Update: Bill Campbell passed away on April 18, 2016, at the age of 75.
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Successful startups undergo significant changes as they approach an
IPO. Increasingly late stage funding rounds put management
teams under even more pressure to grow faster and faster. However, these
expectations often overwhelm the capabilities of the founders and their
teams. And while the preferred startup narrative is a rocket like ascent from launch to success, the reality consists of blow-ups and misses.
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The Coach is an almost mythical authority in Silicon Valley when it comes to dealing with those situations. Bill Campbell was on the boards of both Loudcloud/Opsware and Netscape and has been a long serving board member at Apple. He is frequently mentioned in Ben Horowitz’s book 'The Hard Things About Hard Things'. He is a self-professed operator and has been a CEO at Claris/Apple, Go, and Intuit. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers brought him in to advise the founders and CEOs of Google, Zynga, Twitter and many others on how to improve company operations.
There is no substitute for working with the Coach. Unfortunately, there is no documented methodology, but are four valuable lenses the Coach has repeatedly and successfully applied, and which form a logical combination - staff alignment, business plan, team meetings, and operating reviews. Here are some of his insights as told by others.
The Staff Alignment
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It was Bill Campbell’s idea to gather a few
key Googlers together and hammer out a set of the young company’s corporate
values.
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Rather than simply focusing on whether a manager has achieved
his financial goals - which can lead to short-term thinking - Campbell gives
equal weight to four areas. The first is traditional: performing against
expectations. But then he looks at management skills, working with peers, and
innovating. If you aren't good at all those things, you aren't good.
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I push hard on innovation and best practices. In the absence of
true innovation, there’s no excuse for not knowing where the best practices
are. And a lot of best practices can come as tweaks that will make a practice
more innovative. I give high grades to anybody who knows exactly what’s going
on in the industry and can adapt to this quickly.
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The Business Plan
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Campbell next initiated a strategic planning process for
[Intuit]. Intuit’s VMOVA (vision, mission, operating values) effort had set
the cornerstone for strategic planning by identifying the company’s values
and missions. Campbell built on these to codify and energize strategic
operational thinking.
In the middle of each quarter, Campbell held an off site at
which each manager submitted a business plan with numerical goals and reviews
performance against these goals. Business leaders presented quarter-to-date
results and objectives for the next quarter; at each meeting leaders had six
weeks’ performance data for the current quarter and six weeks to plan for the
next one. Each manager could change key variables - staffing, expenses,
direct-marketing spending, tech support, and so on - before the quarter
began. ...Over a period of time, Campbell’s meetings generated a perpetual
quarterly plan.
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The Team Meetings
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My contention today is that that if a month is
20 working days, you’ve got to spend a day doing nothing but reviewing
projects. A whole day, with the whole management team, so that we can clean
up those projects, clean out the ones that aren’t going to be good, and take
the bodies that are recovered and put them on the projects that look like
they have the best prospects.
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These management planning offsites [...] unified
the company. ...Campbell valued the social as much as the strategic elements
of the meetings because he knew that stronger relationships would improve
teamwork and business results. After a few quarters, he had a management team
working effectively together, both formally and informally.
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The key skill is not in convincing people of
your point of view with rational arguments, but, when circumstances require,
in build a feeling of consensus in the face of uncertainty or adversity.
Bill’s strength was his ability of select a straight course through the
swirling darkness, then create a deep emotional reserve in his team that
drives them to victory, even when defeat seems inevitable. he metered out
sufficient time for open discussion, then closed debate with a fatherly
decision that all were expected to accept as their own, in the service of the
greater good.
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One of Bill’s first acts as CEO was to
establish a kind of corporate rhythm, a weekly sequence of meetings by which
the company shared information and made decisions. This organizational pulse
started on Monday morning at nine-thirty with ‘estaff’ - a meeting of the executive
staff, where large issues and strategic initiatives were discussed - and
ended on Friday at four-thirty with the ‘comm’ meeting, where the entire
company gathered to communicate new, make announcements and give demos and
awards. estaff started as late as nine-thirty because Bill, who usually
arrived at the office around six, liked to spend the early morning talking to
the East Coast, before people there went to lunch, and meeting privately with
any employee who had a problem that couldn’t be solved through normal
channels. Following the comm meeting was a ‘beer bust’, with drinks and
munchies, a Silicon Valley tradition that Bill had followed since his Apple
days.
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The Operating Reviews
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He instituted monthly operations reviews, in
which senior managers provided updates so that Campbell could help set goals
and track revenues and expenses. Cook welcomed the discipline in these
monthly reviews, which harkened back to the quantitative analysis and metrics
he’d introduced to marketing.
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I care about the ones that care a lot about
operating values, that care about durability and lasting value. I’m not
interested in ‘quick in and out’.
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