How do you become successful in Silicon Valley? What made companies like Google what they are today? And how excited you are People like Steve Jobs? An insider overview.
Technology industry heroes
On a warm April day in 2016, a massive mourner gathered on the football field at Sacred Heart School in the heart of Atherton, California, to commemorate William Vincent Campbell Jr. to give the last escort after this im Age had succumbed to cancer at the age of seventy-five. Bill Campbell has been a key part of the American West since moving to the American West in 1983 Success from Apple, Google, Intuit and numerous other companies.
Claiming he should have been greatest in the tech industry Respect Acquired would be a gross understatement - "love" would be more accurate. Among the guests on this day were the top representatives of the Industry assembled: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Mary Meeker, John Doerr, Ruth Porat, Scott Cook, Brad Smith, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, to name a few. Such concentrated pioneering spirit and so much power is rare - at least in Silicon Valley.
From quirky startup to most valuable company in the world
We sat among the mourners and talked in hushed tones as the sun shone kindly on us, making an odd contrast to the depressed mood. We had worked closely with Bill during the years I was CEO of Google. Bill was ours Training been. We used to meet every week or two to talk about the various challenges we face in developing the Company asked. He accompanied us – mostly behind the scenes – as individuals and as Team on the journey that took Google from a quirky start-up to one of the most valuable companies and brands in the world Welt has led.
It is possible that many things would have turned out differently if Bill had not helped us. We called him our coach, but also our friend, and in that we hardly differed from the rest of the mourners. As we later learned, many of them - and there were more than a thousand guests - even thought of Bill as their best friend. So who of all these best friends would have the honor of being a Rede to hold onto our coach? Which high-tech luminary would take the lectern?
The champion from Homestead
When Bill Campbell first came to California, he was already in his early 40s. He had only embarked on his business career a few years earlier. But what he then achieved in Silicon Valley was many times what any other 75-year-old could have achieved at the end of a long working life. Even as a child, Bill was ambitious and bright Head been. He grew up in the small steel town of Homestead, western Pennsylvania, where his father was a gym teacher at the local high school and part-time work at the steel mill.
Bill was a good and hardworking student. He was also clever: in April 1955 he wrote one Article for the school newspaper, in which he reminded his classmates that "there is nothing more important for later life" than good grades. "If you stroll around school, you lose important chances of success." That was in his first year of high school.
It depends on the right attitude
In the fall of 1958, Bill left his home to study at Columbia University in Manhattan. He'd become a football star in high school. With his 1,77 meters and 75 kilograms (even if he was registered with 82 kilograms) he was outwardly not the type - even for the conditions at the time, when football players were not yet the colossi of today. With his enthusiasm and his intelligent game, he earned the respect of coaches and teammates. In his last year of high school he spent - now as team captain - practically every minute of the game as a linebacker in defense or as a lineman (guard) in the offense on the field. He helped his team to the only championship title in the Ivy League in Columbia history and earned the All-Ivy Honors as one of the best players in the entire league.
The then coach with the beautiful name Buff Donelli attested him a "significant role" in winning the title. “If he were six feet tall and weighed 1,87 pounds and competed as a professional, he'd be the best lineman the league has ever seen - a ball of fire. But he's small and weighs just 102 kilograms. Not even in college football do you find such little guards. Usually you can't play football with small players. The right mindset is usually not enough. A coach depends on the right attitude, but also on the right players. «Bill's attitude was, of course, that it depends on the team. He attributed the team's success to the fact that »the players pulled together and one experienced Guide had".
From taxi driver to millionaire
Bill didn't have much Money and so he funded his Study on the Columbia not least by driving a taxi. He got to know the city so well that he later often argued with his longtime chauffeur and friend Scotty Kramer about the best route. When it came to navigating New York, you didn't question the coach, says Kramer.
After earning a degree in economics in 1962 and a master's degree in teaching in 1964, Bill left Columbia and went north to become assistant coach on the football team at Boston College. Bill was a great coach and quickly made a name for himself in football circles. When he received an offer from Columbia, his alma mater, to return as head coach, he accepted. Columbia was miserable in football, but feelings of inner connection brought him back to Manhattan.
According to fellow coach Jim Rudgers, Bill, who was considered one of the best assistant coaches in the country, was offered a coaching position under Joe Paterno at Penn State before he "followed his heart" and returned to Columbia. Paterno was then one of the top coaches in the country and one can assume that Bill had a steep Career expected as a coach he would have gone to the Nittany Lions. This text might not have been a text about Silicon Valley legend but college football legend Bill Campbell. And then you might not have any trouble finding tons of information about him in the popular search engines!
As a trainer to burnout
Coaching- Talent or not, Bill's return to Columbia was not a success story. Even the prerequisites were anything but promising: a shabby training ground, only a 30-minute bus ride from the campus in the afternoon traffic to reach, an administration that has little to do with football Significance attached, and a city in general decline. The Lions won just twelve games and lost forty-one during Bill's tenure. His best season came in 1978, when the team went into the race with an opening record of three wins, one loss and one draw, but were then crushed 69-0 at Giants Stadium by the vastly superior (physically and numerically) Rutgers team was beaten. The following year, Bill finally made the decision to resign as coach; he finished the season that had started, but that was it.
Bill had worked so hard at Columbia that in the end only a stay in the hospital gave him the rest he needed. Especially the recruitment of new players demanded a lot from him. Later on he said he had a hundred possible Candidates have to talk to get at least twenty-five of them to join the team. 'So I drove to that Work-out at 16.30pm to Albany and back the same evening or to Scranton and back again just so I can be back on time the next morning Office was."
Too much compassion as a success factor for business
However, in the end he did not fail because of a lack of players. Rather, he blamed it on too much compassion. “There's something you need [as a football coach] that I would call unemotional rigor, and I don't think I have it. You must not dwell on feelings. You constantly have to get everyone to do more Performance drive and to a certain extent be deaf to feelings. You swap players at random, replacing older ones with younger ones, and so on. That's the game: Survival of the fittest. The best players start. I always found that difficult. It was important to me that the guys understood what we were doing. Maybe I just wasn't tough enough."
Bill's view that it takes a dose of numbness to be successful as a football coach may have been correct. In the business world, however, compassion is increasingly crystallizing as something that should not be neglected Success factor out of here. And so Bill, who couldn't help but treat everyone with compassion, ended up being many times more successful in the business world than he was on the football field. Let's run it That was the end of his football career. The 39-year-old took a job at advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. His first Customer was Kraft in Chicago. A few months later he went back to the East Coast to work for Kodak. He threw himself into the job with his usual passion and impressed his customers in Rochester, New York State with his Background and his analytical skills to such an extent that they poached him from the advertising agency without further ado.
Wild Wild West
Bill quickly made a career at Kodak: in 1983 he was already in London in charge of the consumer products division for the European market. At the beginning of his Job Search In 1979, one of his Columbia football buddies introduced him to John Sculley, then a senior executive at PepsiCo, who offered him a job, but he didn't take it. When Sculley went to Silicon Valley to become Apple's CEO in 1983, he dialed Bill's number shortly thereafter. Would he be willing to turn his back on Kodak and together with his young Family — he had married Roberta Spagnola, the dorm manager at Columbia, in 1976 — to move west to work for Apple?
"My many years as a sleepy football coach had set me back in my career," Bill later said. »My feeling told me that this history would stick with me forever and set me back compared to my colleagues. The ›Wild West‹ with its stronger one Esteem individual performance would give me the chance fast to rise to the top echelons.”8 And indeed, he rose rapidly. After just nine months at Apple, he became vice president of sales and marketing Marketing promoted and tasked with overseeing the launch of the much-anticipated Macintosh—Apple's new computer that would succeed the Apple II as the company's flagship product.
Inspire Steve Jobs once
For the start of the campaign, the company relied on a bang: It bought a slot for a commercial during the Super Bowl on January 22, 1984 in Tampa, Florida. When the spot was finished, Bill and his people introduced him to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In a nod to George Orwell's novel 1984, there is a Boy Ms. to be seen running through a dark corridor, pursued by security guards, until she reaches a room where hundreds of bald people in tattered clothes are staring like zombies at a big screen and the blaring voice follow Big Brother. Screaming, she throws a giant sledgehammer at the screen, which then explodes. The credits say the Apple Macintosh will show us "why 1984 won't be like 1984."*
Steve was delighted, as was E. Floyd Kvamme, Bill's former Executive. Bill himself was delighted. Ten days before the game, they presented the spot to the Apple board. Board members were less than enthusiastic. They thought it was terrible - too expensive and too controversial. They wanted to know if the slot could be resold to another advertiser. Was it too late to get out of the number? A few days later, Bill and Floyd heard from an Apple sales executive that she had found a buyer for the slot. "What should we tell you?" Opinions what to do?” Floyd asked Bill. And he replied: Fuck it! Let's run it - »Fuck it, we'll show it!«
They did not reveal to the board or other senior executives in the company that there was a potential buyer for the slot, and they showed the spot. Not only did it become the Super Bowl's most popular commercial, it became one of the most iconic commercials of all time, ushering in an era in which the Super Bowl commercials became as important as the games themselves. A Los Angeles Times columnist called it the " only good commercial ever shown at the Super Bowl. ”9 Not bad for a“ sleepy football coach ”barely five years after his last season.
Post a Comment