Doerr served on Campbell ’s Intuit board, and had called on him to mentor young leaders of Valley companies. Regularly, Campbell would join fifteen or so of Doerr’s dot-com CEO clients over dinner. The sessions are dubbed Camp Campbell, “and I’m not allowed to attend,” said Doerr, who described Campbell “as one of my two best friends.” In late summer of 2001, Doerr reached out to his friend to help Schmidt and the founders. “I felt it was an opportunity worth Bill’s time,” he said. “Eric had not been CEO on a scale Google would become. Larry and Sergey and Eric needed to be coached.”
In the Valley, Coach Campbell is a magnet for friends old and new. Still the chairman of Intuit, he is also the colead outside director at Apple, and one of Steve Jobs’s few confidants. On weekends and evenings, when big college or professional football and basketball games are televised, Campbell can often be found with a group of buddies in downtown Palo Alto ’s Old Pro sports bar, a Stanford student hangout he owns. He’ll have a table in the middle of the pub piled high with hamburgers, French fries, pizzas, and his preferred drink, Bud Lite. Just under six feet tall, Campbell is easily spotted, and not just by the Kennedyesque thatch of gray hair that sprawls across his forehead: he’s the guy in constant motion, moving about the room dispensing high fives, fist pumps, hugs, and baseball caps. He sports an oversized Columbia 1962 ring and weighs just three or four pounds more than he did as a college linebacker. At the Old Pro, he’s garrulous. Outside, he’s allergic to interviews with reporters, and even with friends he sequesters conversations he has with other intimates. His discretion is well known, and part of his allure.
In a rare 2007 interview with two McKinsey amp; Co’s partners for the McKinsey Quarterly, Campbell said something that is music to engineers at places like Google: “empowered engineers are the single most important thing that you can have in a company.” He was talking about a tech company, and he went on to say that to foster innovation “you’ve got to be careful that you don’t make engineers beholden to product-marketing people. For me, growth is the goal, and growth comes through having innovation. Innovation comes through having great engineers, not great product-marketing guys.” He also said that smart tech executives should spend entire days “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.”
Explaining Campbell ’s role as a bridge builder at Google, Moritz said, “Bill’s contribution has been to take the emotion out of decisions. He’s more objective. He’s seen as a neutral source and a fair man.” The objectivity was needed, he explained, because: “You had two founders who were in their twenties and Eric was twenty years older, and you had to make that relationship work between people who did not know each other. It was natural that the founders would be suspicious. There were bumps at the beginning that Bill helped smooth over.” The biggest bumps, another Google insider said, were not between Schmidt and the founders, but with two venture capitalists on the board, Doerr and Moritz: “Eric had a busy-body board. The impression the board had was that Larry and Sergey were not focused. When they got Eric in, now they wanted to micromanage him.” They wanted Schmidt to push harder to monetize search. Doerr and Moritz “were both impatient,” said Shriram, who had served as a bridge between the founders and the board and gratefully handed this role to Campbell.
“I would sit with Larry and Sergey and try to figure out the things they more or less wanted from Eric,” recalled Campbell. Then he’d sit with Schmidt. He performed this particular function for three years, until 2005. Looking back over the life of Google, these sessions where Campbell performed as both a psychologist and a coach loom especially large. The company could have imploded. On Campbell ’s shoulders rested a complex problem. He had to earn the trust of the founders, Schmidt, the board, and Google executives. He had to help put management systems in place, recruit executives, suggest financial controls and the structure of board and management meetings.
One would expect an ex-football coach to be an in-your-face, blustery, and threatening personality. And Campbell sounds like he would be, for he has a deep, hoarse voice that seems the product of yelling all day. But he is self-effacing, quick with a quip, more listener than talker. Schmidt likens Campbell ’s ability to listen to that of a shrink, adding, “When he walks into a room, everyone smiles. I’ve never seen that.” But he also said that “shrinks are seen as passive,” which is why he believes the “coach” appellation is more accurate. “A coach says, ‘Let’s go!”’
Campbell laughs when told that some refer to him as Google’s shrink and offers this modest explanation of his role: “Sometimes when you are in a big and complex organization, your behavior is noted. And if your behavior is sometimes out of line, sometimes it’s me that will say, ‘Move it a little bit in this direction or that direction. Not much.’ Shrink would not be the right description. It’s more coaching people into the right direction.”
It did not take long for Campbell to win over Schmidt and the founders. “Bill took me under his wing,” said Schmidt, who refers to him as “my consiglieri.” Campbell is so valuable at Google, Page said, because “he has the unique ability to be a warm person, one that everyone can relate to, but also has the experience of actually running a company” Brin smiles when asked about Campbell and speaks of his “especially high EQ,” emotional intelligence. A principal criticism of Brin and Page is that they, like many of their engineers, lack EQ. Did he, I asked, think they lacked EQ? “We are ranked far below Bill Campbell,” Brin conceded.
Two Campbell ideas embraced by the troika were an executive management meeting with their direct reports and Campbell that consumes several hours every Monday, and project review meetings with engineers that occupy much of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. Campbell regularly holds one-on-one sessions with other senior executives to offer evaluations, mediate management disputes, hold hands. In other companies, Brin said, politics become excessive when you get to be large. “One of the reasons we’ve been able to avoid politics is Bill Campbell. When issues arise, he’s willing to intercede.” One day I’d scheduled an interview first with Brin and then Campbell. But Brin had arrived late and we backed into Campbell ’s allotted time. We were in the small conference room a few doors from Brin’s office in Building 43 and Campbell ambled in for his scheduled interview. Brin smiled and instantly rose from his chair and the two men hugged.
Campbell participates in the Monday executive management meeting, discusses the agenda that Schmidt sends out to participants specifying the decisions they need to discuss at the meeting. He acts as envoy, visiting YouTube headquarters with some frequency in the first half of 2008 to find ways to generate revenues from the popular video site and improve communications between the two companies. Campbell is the only outside person ever welcomed into Google’s inner sanctums. In addition to executive meetings, he attends board meetings. “He’s closer to us than the board,” said David Krane, director of global communications and public affairs. “Eric said management is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s stressful,” Page said. “Bill plays an important role of keeping us all healthy and interacting.”
Why does he volunteer to spend approximately two full days a week on the Google campus? “This is family for me,” he said, a catch in his voice. “These are people I love dearly. I’ve been doing this since late 2001. I probably get as much out of this as everybody gets out of me. The joy of participating at a company that is at the leading edge of anything going on in the personal technology space. It’s centered here. There’s innovation daily. They think about changing the world.” He refuses to be paid more than a dollar a year; in 2007, his compensation was increased when he was given a reserved parking space on a campus where spaces are usually filled by 10 a.m. Brin said he and Page had to insist on compensating Campbell with Google stock options. The fact that Campbell plays such an atypical role at Google suggests that in addition to coach or shrink he can also be described as a babysit ter. The fact that Google needs one is a reminder of its youth.