Bill

"We borrowed from Jim Collins: “What can you be the best at in the world?” Once we figured that out, we laid the OKR system on top of it. We believed that everyone should have a healthy and productive life, and Bill and Melinda were passionate about the role of technology in creating change. That was in our DNA."

"Before Bill, GO’s executive team would preface every vote with a heated argument over strategy, making for winners, losers, and general hard feelings."

"After Bill became CEO, all of that changed. He’d sit with individual executives and ask them about their families, and tell a story or two in his colloquial way, and gradually he’d learn how they felt about the issue at hand. He had a remarkable way of getting people to agree in advance before they came into the room, and soon there was no more voting at GO. For Bill, it was always about the team, the company. He was devoid of private motives or agendas. The mission was paramount."

"When it came to Google’s OKRs, Bill paid closest attention to the less glamorous, “committed” objectives. (A favorite piece of coaching, served with his typical dash of salt: “You’ve got to make the f—ing trains run on time.”)"

"to Bill’s deceptively modest-sounding motto: “Be better every day.” There is nothing more challenging—or more fulfilling—than that."

"Early in Bill’s four-year Intuit tenure, he faced a crisis. Revenues were lagging to the point where they were going to miss the quarter. We had a blue-sky, visionary board of directors that was pushing to invest more capital and power through the shortfall. When the board met in a hotel suite in Las Vegas, the Coach wasn’t buying it. “Cut the crap,” he said. “We’re going to cut back and lay some people off. We’re going to get leaner because we’ve got to make the numbers. It’s part of the discipline and the culture I want.” Bill felt strongly about delivering results—for the shareholders, but also for the team and the customers."

"As Bill was assessing me, I was assessing him, and realizing that his fans had misread him. He didn’t want to be a comedian; he wanted to be a great actor. Left to his own devices, he might have stuck to character roles in small quirky films. He was a free spirit who tried to make daily life into a movie scene, with the crucial difference that there was no script, so anything could happen. That afternoon he ordered a cup of coffee at a diner and said, “Good party,” totally deadpan, and the server cracked up. Even crossing the street became an exercise in improv theater."

"He had this little way of taking the pressure off with a comment or, on occasion, some sarcasm. Humor was one of his assets. One time, to emphasize the dress code, he had all the assistant coaches come into a meeting wearing outfits that were ridiculous. One was dressed like a bum, another like a hippie, and somebody was wearing tights, a dress, and falsies—that may have been Bill. He said something like, “Now, we don’t want to look like this on the road, do we?” He made a serious point with humor."

"The way to get the best idea, he believed, was to get all of the opinions and ideas out in the open, on the table for the group to discuss. Air the problem honestly, and make sure people have the opportunity to provide their authentic opinions, especially if they are dissenting. If the problem or decision at hand is more functional in nature (for example, primarily a marketing or finance decision), then the discussion should be led by the person with that functional expertise. When it is a broader decision cutting across multiple functional areas, then the team leader owns the discussion. Regardless, it should involve everyone’s point of view. To get those ideas on the table, Bill would often sit down with individuals before the meeting to find out what they were thinking. This enabled Bill to understand the different perspectives, but more important, it gave members of his team the chance to come into the room prepared to talk about their point of view. Discussing it with Bill helped gather their thoughts and ideas before the broader discussion. Maybe they would all be aligned by the time they got there, maybe not, but they had already thought through, and talked through, their own perspective and were ready to present it."

"Bill took great care in preparing for one-on-one meetings. Remember, he believed the most important thing a manager does is to help people be more effective and to grow and develop, and the 1:1 is the best opportunity to accomplish that. Once he became a full-time coach, he varied his approach to suit the person he was coaching. But as a CEO he developed a standard format, which is what he always taught others. He always started with the “small talk,” but in Bill’s case, the talk wasn’t really that small. Oftentimes, small talk in a work environment is cursory: a quick “how are the kids?” or chatter about the morning commute before moving on to the business stuff. Conversations with Bill were more meaningful and layered; you sometimes got the feeling that the conversation about life was more the point of the meeting than the business topics. In fact, while his interest in people’s lives was quite sincere, it had a powerful benefit: a 2010 study concludes that having these sort of “substantive” conversations, as opposed to truly small talk, makes people happier.12 From the (not so) small talk, Bill moved to performance: What are you working on? How is it going? How could he help? Then, we would always get to peer relationships, which Bill thought were more important than relationships with your manager and other higher-ups. One day, Jonathan spent part of his 1:1 with Bill talking about how he wasn’t getting any feedback from the founders on his work. What do they want? he wondered. Bill’s response was that Jonathan should not worry about top-down feedback; rather, he should pay attention to input from his peers. What do your teammates think of you? That’s what’s important! They proceeded to talk about Jonathan’s peers, how they generally appreciated the work he was doing, and what he could do better. From peer relationships, Bill would move on to teams. He always wanted to know, were we setting a clear direction for them, and constantly…"

"Sheryl finally copped to the truth: so far, she didn’t do anything. “I learned an incredibly important lesson,” she says. “It’s not what you used to do, it’s not what you think, it’s what you do every day.” This is perhaps the most important characteristic Bill looked for in his players: people who show up, work hard, and have an impact every day. Doers."

"When his team was confronted with a challenging decision, Eric liked to use a management technique he called the “rule of two.” He would get the two people most closely involved in the decision to gather more information and work together on the best solution, and usually they would come back a week or two later having decided together on the best course of action. The team almost always agreed with their recommendation, because it was usually quite obvious that it was the best idea. The rule of two not only generates the best solution in most cases, it also promotes collegiality. It empowers the two people who are working on the issue to figure out ways to solve the problem, a fundamental principle of successful mediation.13 And it forms a habit of working together to resolve conflict that pays off with better camaraderie and decision making for years afterward.*14 This time around, it wasn’t happening. The two executives were dug in. When Eric asked Bill for advice, he replied, “You say, all right, either you two break that tie, or I will.” Eric took Bill’s advice, giving the two managers another week to come to an agreement. They failed, so Eric stepped in and made the decision."

"START WITH TRIP REPORTS For more than a decade, Eric held his weekly staff meetings on Mondays at 1 p.m. In many ways, these meetings were pretty much like any other staff meeting you might have been to. There was an agenda, check-ins with everyone around the table, people surreptitiously checking email and texts . . . all the usual stuff. Eric did one thing different from the norm, though: when everyone had come into the room and gotten settled, he’d start by asking what people did for the weekend, or, if they had just come back from a trip, he’d ask for an informal trip report. This was a staff that included Larry Page and Sergey Brin, so often the weekend report included kiteboarding tales or updates from the world of extreme fitness, but it also could skew toward the more mundane: Jonathan’s daughter’s latest soccer achievements, or engineering lead Alan Eustace’s score on the golf course.* Sometimes, if he had just returned from a business trip, Eric offered his own report, putting a Google map on the screen with pins dropped on the cities where he’d visited. He’d go city by city, talking about his trip and the interesting things he’d observed. While this conversation seemed impromptu and informal at first glance, it was a part of a communications approach that Bill had developed over the years and improved in collaboration with Eric. The objectives were twofold. First, for team members to get to know each other as people, with families and interesting lives outside of work. And second, to get everyone involved in the meeting from the outset in a fun way, as Googlers and human beings, and not just as experts and owners of their particular roles. Bill and Eric understood that there’s a direct correlation between fun work environments and higher performance, with conversation about family and fun (what academics might call “socioemotional communication”) being an easy way to achieve the former. Later in the meeting, when business decisions were being discussed, Eric wanted everyone to weigh in, regardless of whether the issue touched on their functional area or not. The simple communications practice—getting people to share stories, to be personal with each other—was in fact a tactic to ensure better decision making and camaraderie. “At first I thought it was really weird,” Dick Costolo says of the trip report practice, which he also learned from Bill. “But when I started doing it and seeing it in practice, wow, it really makes a difference. The whole dynamic of the meeting changes, you get more empathy, a better mood.” Dick tells the story of how he attended the staff meeting of a CEO he was mentoring, and the meeting started with hot topics and issues—no social talk whatsoever. “It really hit me in the face how jarring that was. I couldn’t tell how well the team worked together and connected.”"

"When we were working on this book and Eric talked about his meetings with Bill, Jonathan had to intervene. That was not how Bill started 1:1s, Jonathan reminded Eric. While Bill did have his top-five list of things to discuss, he didn’t write them on the whiteboard for all to see. Rather, he would hold them back, like a poker player holding his cards close to the vest. After talking about family and other nonwork stuff, Bill would ask Jonathan what his top five items were. Jonathan came to realize that this approach was Bill’s way of seeing how Jonathan was prioritizing his time and effort. If Bill led off with his list, Jonathan simply could have agreed with it. The discussion of the list was in itself a form of coaching (apparently one that Eric never needed). In teaching his management seminar at Google, Bill advocated that each person should put his or her list…"

"FIVE WORDS ON A WHITEBOARD Our one-on-one meetings with Bill were always held at his nondescript office off California Avenue, Palo Alto’s quieter commercial district a mile or so south of the glitzier University Avenue. This felt like a waste of time at first—why couldn’t he come to Google?—but we quickly realized it was the right location. After all, when you go see your therapist, you go see your therapist. When making the pilgrimage to Bill, you’d enter through an unmarked door, go up the stairs to the second floor, down a hallway, give Debbie Brookfield, his longtime assistant, a hug, then go into the conference room to wait for him. For Eric’s meetings, there were always five words written on the whiteboard, indicating the topics to discuss that day. The words might be about a person, a product, an operational issue, or an upcoming meeting. That’s how they organized their talk."

"LEAD BASED ON FIRST PRINCIPLES So how do you make that hard decision? When you are a manager trying to move your team toward making a decision, the room will be rife with opinions. Bill always counseled us to try to cut through those opinions and get to the heart of the matter. In any situation there are certain immutable truths upon which everyone can agree. These are the “first principles,” a popular phrase and concept around Silicon Valley. Every company and every situation has its set of them. You can argue opinions, but you generally can’t argue principles, since everyone has already agreed upon them. As Bill would point out, it’s the leader’s job, when faced with a tough decision, to describe and remind everyone of those first principles. As a result, the decision often becomes much easier to make."

"In our experience, aberrant geniuses can be enormously valuable and productive. They can build great products and high-performing teams. They have quick insights. They are simply better in many, many ways. And they can have both the ego and the fragility to match their outsized talent and performance. They often put a lot of energy into personal gains at the expense of peer relationships. A me-first attitude sometimes creeps through (or barges in), which can cause resentment in others and affect their performance. Here is where the art of balance comes in: there is aberrant behavior, and there is aberrant behavior. How much do you tolerate, and when is it too much? Where is that elusive boundary? Never put up with people who cross ethical lines: lying, lapses of integrity or ethics, harassing or mistreating colleagues. In a way, these are the easier cases, since the decision is so clear-cut. The harder cases are the ones where the person doesn’t cross these lines. How do you determine when the damage a person causes exceeds their considerable contributions? There’s no perfect answer to this, but there are a few warning signs. All of these are coachable, but if there’s no change, they shouldn’t be tolerated. Does the aberrant genius break team communications? Does he interrupt others, or attack or rebuke them? Does he make people afraid to talk? Does the aberrant genius suck up too much management time? It’s hard to know when an aberrant genius’s behavior has become too toxic for the team to bear, but if you are spending hours upon hours controlling the damage, that’s a good sign it’s gone too far. A lot of that time is usually spent arguing with the person, which is rarely constructive. One time Bill was coaching a Google manager about an aberrant genius on the team, and he summed up the situation neatly. “I don’t know why I’m defending him,” Bill noted, “except that his brilliance is one of the things that makes us great. How can we capture the good and dismiss the bad? You can’t be with him eighteen hours a day!” The eighteen-hours-a-day comment was an overstatement, but not a huge one; the person was requiring an inordinate amount of management damage control. He eventually left the company.*"

"DON’T STICK IT IN THEIR EAR And when he was finished asking questions and listening, and busting your butt, he usually would not tell you what to do. He believed that managers should not walk in with an idea and “stick it in their ear.” Don’t tell people what to do, tell them stories about why they are doing it. “I used to describe success and prescribe to everyone how we were going to do it,” says Dan Rosensweig. “Bill coached me to tell stories. When people understand the story they can connect to it and figure out what to do. You need to get people to buy in. It’s like a running back in football. You don’t tell him exactly what route to run. You tell him where the hole is and what’s the blocking scheme and let him figure it out.”"

"Bill had us pay close attention to running meetings well; “get the 1:1 right” and “get the staff meeting right” are tops on the list of his most important management principles. He felt that these meetings are the most important tools available to executives in running the company, and that each one should be approached thoughtfully."

"ONLY COACH THE COACHABLE On a January day in 2002, Jonathan drove over to the Google office in Mountain View, where he thought he was going to pick up a formal job offer to become head of the growing Google product team. He thought the job was a lock, but once he arrived, he was escorted to a plain conference room where a gruff, older guy greeted him. It was the first time Jonathan met Bill. He couldn’t quite remember who Bill was, and did not realize, at least at first, that this guy was the final gateway on the road to employment at the company. No problem, thought Jonathan, I’m a pretty big deal, SVP from a successful tech company, @Home. I got this! Bill looked at Jonathan for what seemed like minutes, then told him that he had spoken with a few of the principals from @Home: its cofounder Tom Jermoluk; its first CEO, William Randolph Hearst III; and one of its investors, John Doerr, who was also on Google’s board. The consensus, Bill reported, was that Jonathan was smart and worked hard. Jonathan’s chest puffed a bit. “But I don’t care about any of that,” Bill said. “I only have one question: Are you coachable?” Jonathan instantly, and regrettably, replied: “It depends on the coach.” Wrong answer. “Smart alecks are not coachable,” Bill snapped. He stood up to leave, interview over, as it dawned on Jonathan that he had heard Eric Schmidt was getting coaching from someone and, oh my God, this must be the guy. Jonathan switched from smart-aleck mode to groveling mode, backing away from his quip (which wasn’t exactly a quip), and asked Bill to continue the conversation. After another moment that felt like minutes, Bill sat back down and talked about how he chose the people he was going to work with based on humility. Leadership is not about you, it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team. Bill believed that good leaders grow over time, that leadership accrues to them from their teams. He thought people who were curious and wanted to learn new things were best suited for this. There was no room in this formula for smart alecks and their hubris. Bill then asked, “What do you want to get out of a coach?” This felt like, and indeed was, a change-your-life-forever moment. And Jonathan couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally and fortunately, in what football fans might call a Hail Mary play, he remembered a quote from Tom Landry, who coached the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys for twenty-nine years, a stint that included twenty straight winning seasons and two Super Bowl titles. “A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.” That’s what I want, Jonathan told Bill. It worked. Jonathan not only got the job, he got the coach he didn’t think he needed, but sorely did."

"Alan Gleicher, who worked with Bill as the head of sales and operations at Intuit, had a simple way of summing up how to be successful with him. “Don’t dance. If Bill asks a question and you don’t know the answer, don’t dance around it. Tell him you don’t know!” For Bill, honesty and integrity weren’t just about keeping your word and telling the truth; they were also about being forthright. This is critical for effective coaching; a good coach doesn’t hide the stuff that’s hard to talk about—in fact, a good coach will draw this out. He or she gets at the hard stuff. Scholars would describe Bill’s approach—listening, providing honest feedback, demanding candor—as “relational transparency,” which is a core characteristic of “authentic leadership.”13 Wharton professor Adam Grant has another term for it: “disagreeable givers.” He notes in an email to us that “we often feel torn between supporting and challenging others. Social scientists reach the same conclusion for leadership as they do for parenting: it’s a false dichotomy. You want to be supportive and demanding, holding high standards and expectations but giving the encouragement necessary to reach them. Basically, it’s tough love. Disagreeable givers are gruff and tough on the surface, but underneath they have others’ best interests at heart. They give the critical feedback no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear.”"

"He looked for commitment, to the cause and not just to their own success. Team first! You need to find, as Sundar Pichai says, “people who understand that their success depends on working well together, that there’s give-and-take—people who put the company first.” Whenever Sundar and Bill found people like that, Sundar says, “we would cherish them.” But how do you know when you have found such a person? Keep note of the times when they give up things, and when they are excited for someone else’s success. Sundar notes that “sometimes decisions come up and people have to give up things. I overindex on those signals when people give something up.* And also when someone is excited because something else is working well in the company. It isn’t related to them, but they are…"

"the HearstLab, a business “greenhouse” for women-led companies that Eve started at Hearst under Bill’s prodding and tutelage. Those companies now have a collective value of more than $200 million! “It was the last thing he pushed me to do,” Eve says. “His vision was to give women a place to seed their companies and make them successful.”"

"So as a coach of teams, what would Bill do? His first instinct was always to work the team, not the problem. In other words, he focused on the team’s dynamics, not on trying to solve the team’s particular challenges. That was their job. His job was team building, assessing people’s talents, and finding the doers. He ran toward the biggest problems, the stinkers that fester and cause tension. He focused on winning but winning right, and he doubled down on his core values when things turned south. And he brought resolution by filling the gaps between people, listening, observing, and then seeking people out in behind-the-scenes conversations that brought teams together."

"PRACTICE FREE-FORM LISTENING In a coaching session with Bill, you could expect that he would listen intently. No checking his phone for texts or email, no glancing at his watch or out the window while his mind wandered. He was always right there. Today it is popular to talk about “being present” or “in the moment.” We’re pretty sure those words never passed the coach’s lips, yet he was one of their great practitioners. Al Gore says he learned from Bill how “important it is to pay careful attention to the person you are dealing with . . . give them your full, undivided attention, really listening carefully. Only then do you go into the issue. There’s an order to it.”"

"We learned early on from Bill that when it came to creating teams, you have to put your bias blinders on (and that we all have biases). To him it was simple. Winning depends on having the best team, and the best teams include more women."

"Bill looked for four characteristics in people. The person has to be smart, not necessarily academically but more from the standpoint of being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections. Bill called this the ability to make “far analogies.” The person has to work hard, and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard-to-define characteristic: grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again. He would tolerate a lot of other faults if he thought a person had those four characteristics. When he interviewed job candidates to assess these points, he wouldn’t just ask about what a person did, he would ask how they did it. If the person said they “led a project that led to revenue growth,” asking how they achieved that growth will tell you a lot about how they were involved…"

"Bill’s guiding principle was that the team is paramount, and the most important thing he looked for and expected in people was a “team-first” attitude. Teams are not successful unless every member is loyal and will, when necessary, subjugate their personal agenda to that of the team. That the team wins has to be the most important thing. Perhaps Charles Darwin said it best in his book The Descent of Man: “A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”"

"The traits of coachability Bill sought were honesty and humility, the willingness to persevere and work hard, and a constant openness to learning. Honesty and humility because a successful coaching relationship requires a high degree of vulnerability, much more than is typical in a business relationship. Coaches need to learn how self-aware a coachee is; they need to not only understand the coachee’s strengths and weaknesses, but also understand how well the coachee understands his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Where are they honest with themselves, and where are their blind spots? And then it is the coach’s job to raise that self-awareness further and to help them see the flaws they don’t see for themselves. People don’t like to talk about these flaws, which is why honesty and humility are so important. If people can’t be honest with themselves and their coach, and if they aren’t humble enough to recognize how they aren’t perfect, they won’t get far in that relationship. Humility, because Bill believed that leadership is about service to something that is bigger than you: your company, your team. Today the concept of “servant leadership” is in vogue and has been directly linked to stronger company performance.*5 Bill believed and practiced it well before it became popular. The coachable people are the ones who can see that they are part of something bigger than themselves. You can have a considerable ego and still be part of an even bigger cause. This is one reason Bill threw himself into coaching people at Google. He foresaw that the company had the potential to have a big impact in the world, to indeed be far bigger in every way than any of its individual execs."

"“You get these quirky guys or women who are going to be great differentiators for you. It is your job to manage that person in a way that doesn’t disrupt the company. They have to be able to work with other people. If they can’t, you need to let them go. They need to work in an environment where they collaborate with other people.” So how do you do this? Over the years, through lots of trial and error and with a lot of advice from Bill, we learned this particular art. Support them as they continue to perform, and minimize time spent fighting them. Instead, invest that energy in trying as hard as possible to coach them past their aberrant behavior. As long as you can do this successfully, the rewards can be tremendous: more genius, less aberrant. “He has everything that he needs,” Bill once wrote Jonathan about one of his problematic team members. “Now that you fully supported him, you should try to get him to behave as a leader. He has"

"“If you’re running a company, you have to surround yourself with really, really good people,” Bill said. Not one of his most surprising statements: it is a tired business mantra to always hire people smarter than yourself. “Everybody that is managing a function on behalf of the CEO ought to be better at that function than the CEO. Some of the time, they are going to be wearing their HR hat or their IT hat, but most of the time you want them to be wearing their company hat. These are all smart people that have great capabilities, and what you want to get is the best idea that comes from that group.”"

"In 2011, Eric stepped down as Google CEO. In the ensuing reorganization, Jonathan’s job as head of products was eliminated. He was considering a few options, including running the Enterprise business (now Google Cloud, a multibillion-dollar division), but decided to decline them all. He felt hurt by the reorg and considered these other jobs a demotion. Bill was so disappointed; Jonathan was putting his bruised ego ahead of what was best for the Google team (and, in fact, himself). He was making a “mistake born of ego and emotion,” and Bill thought Jonathan maybe should consider removing his head from his ass. Bill suggested that Jonathan take more time to consider his decision, and he continued to meet with him on a regular basis. With Bill’s help, Jonathan later found his way back into the Google fold by taking on…"

"Bill highly valued peer relationships. An important, often overlooked, aspect of team building is developing relationships within the team. This can happen organically, but it is important enough that it should not be left to chance. So Bill looked for any opportunity to pair people up. Take a couple of people who don’t usually work together, assign them a task, project, or decision, and let them work on it on their own. This develops trust between the two people, usually regardless of the nature of the work.*4"

"Things come up, tensions arise, and they don’t naturally go away. People do their best to avoid talking about these situations, because they’re awkward. Which makes it worse. When that happens, people refer to the “elephant in the room”: the big problem that overshadows everything but that no one acknowledges. As former Avon CEO Andrea Jung says, “With Bill there was never an elephant in the room.” Or, more accurately, there might have been an elephant, but it wasn’t hiding in the corner. Bill wouldn’t allow that. He brought the thing front and center."

"Bill valued courage: the willingness to take risks and the willingness to stand up for what’s right for the team, which…"

"Ideal Model Illustrated on this page is an ideal model of decision-making in a know-how business. The first stage should be free discussion, in which all points of view and all aspects of an issue are openly welcomed and debated. The greater the disagreement and controversy, the more important becomes the word free. This sounds obvious, but it’s not often the practice. Usually when a meeting gets heated, participants hang back, trying to sense the direction of things, saying nothing until they see what view is likely to prevail. They then throw their support behind that view to avoid being associated with a losing position. Bizarre as it may seem, some organizations actually encourage such behavior. Let me quote from a news account relating to the woes of a certain American automobile company: “In the meeting in which I was informed that I was released, I was told, ‘Bill, in general, people who do well in this company wait until they hear their superiors express their view and then contribute something in support of that view.’ ” This is a terrible way to manage. All it produces is bad decisions, because if knowledgeable people withhold opinions, whatever is decided will be based on information and insight less complete than it could have been otherwise. The ideal decision-making process. The next stage is reaching a clear decision. Again, the greater the disagreement about the issue, the more important becomes the word clear. In fact, particular pains should be taken to frame the terms of the decision with utter clarity. Again, our tendency is to do just the opposite: when we know a decision is controversial we want to obscure matters to avoid an argument. But the argument is not avoided by our being mealy-mouthed, merely postponed. People who don’t like a decision will be a lot madder if they don’t get a prompt and straight story about it. Finally, everyone involved must give the decision reached by the group full support. This does not necessarily mean agreement: so long as the participants commit to back the decision, that is a satisfactory outcome. Many people have trouble supporting a decision with which they do not agree, but that they need to do so is simply inevitable. Even when we all have the same facts and we all have the interests of an organization in mind, we tend to have honest, strongly felt, real differences of opinion. No matter how much time we may spend trying to forge agreement, we just won’t be able to get it on many issues. But an organization does not live by its members agreeing with one another at all times about everything. It lives instead by people committing to support the decisions and the moves of the business. All a manager can expect is that the commitment to support is honestly present, and this is something he can and must get from everyone. The ideal decision-making model seems an easy one to follow. Yet I have found that it comes easily to only two classes of professional employees—senior managers who have…"

"The great gift that Bill has for people is he instills in them the faith in themselves that they can do something. Whether they can do it or not, they’re going to learn how to do it, because they think they can do it. And nine times out of ten, they can do it. I know he did that to me many times. He’d give me something to do that I thought, I can’t possibly do this—and then did it. And he must have thought I could do it or he wouldn’t have given it to me. I’ve seen him do that throughout his career. He’s very good at it."

"He is always ready to make decisions, and to take responsibility for them. Bill is a risk taker and, if he feels he can do something, he’s not afraid to go do it. Many people are afraid to make a decision because they don’t want to stand up to the heat that comes with it,"

"Bill is obviously very decisive. He makes up his mind quickly. He has a very distinct set of beliefs. He believes in the free market economy, in individual freedom. He has a lot of energy and is very motivated to do things to carry out his beliefs. He is a unique person because he is so passionate about what he believes in, and so energetic about pursuing his beliefs. Bill is not a person who compromises easily"

"When we returned to Denver from the CableLabs trip to the West Coast, while Bill was in talks to invest $1 billion with Brian, I called an old friend at GI, Ed Breen, who had worked on digital technology at the GI VideoCipher division. Ed got his start at GI selling converter boxes and rose fast to be SVP of worldwide sales; less than ten years later, he would be running the company as CEO. “Gates can make these boxes for three hundred dollars,” I blurted out to Ed almost as soon as he answered the phone. Of course, he raised the specter that Gates would simply subsidize the cost until the industry was in his stranglehold. I knew that GI needed a hit as badly as we did. Even though GI discovered the breakthrough for digital compression, business was hurting because cable operators, TCI among them, had put off costly upgrades in the rounds of rate cuts following the 1992 Cable Act, which had crimped cash flow. GI had about 60 percent market share in TV set-top boxes but wanted the new digital business. Ed said that the best price on the box at the time was $400, more than double the cost of a typical analog box. “Okay, let’s get serious about it,” I said. “How many do you have to be buying for and by when, to get your price down to a three-hundred-dollar price?” Ed knew the specs and pricing of the box better than anyone, and I trusted him. “You know, if you ordered ten million of these things, we could get the ball rolling, because that would be a three-billion-dollar purchase order.”"

"Strategically, I knew that Bill was blocking an easy play between AOL, the fastest-growing online service, and TCI, the largest cable operator in the country. But I also believed what he was saying about the market, so I asked him, “What are you suggesting? What’s the alternative?” “Well, why don’t you just buy twenty percent of Microsoft Network? This is going wide fast, and it’s certain to be a massive success.” “What are you going to charge me for this?” I asked. “Well, why don’t you pay me the same amount you were going to pay Paul for his block. This could be worth an enormous amount… who knows?” This was a rather rich ask. Gates was seeking, for just 20 percent of his new and untested service, the same price we were about to pay for 25 percent of the leader in the online access business. It might sound a little arrogant, yet it also sounded like the truth."

"To his credit, Bill conceded he had been blindsided by the government’s onerous restrictions and overconfident about the Microsoft Network in the early days of online. “Yeah, John, you know, I’m really sorry about that. Why don’t I just return your Liberty shares?” And that’s exactly what he did, returning the shares in Liberty in 1996, even though Liberty shares over the same two-year period had increased dramatically as well. Bill saw past the profit and saw more in the gesture. He was fair, which is one of the highest compliments one CEO can give another in the blood sport of dealmaking."

"The day we turned off the insert's life support, Bill and I made sure everyone worked extra late on the new venture, the subscription version of Bloomberg Personal. More important than any publication is our organization; we didn't want people to feel their jobs were in danger, or that they would be penalized for conceiving of or working on a "failure.""

"If the Gammells were prosperous and well connected, they were also tough and practical Scots. The family rite of passage was to send each grown child ‘somewhere in the world’ with a one-way ticket the year after leaving school. One brother went to Tanzania, another rode the range in Texas, a third went to Canada and their sister went to Pennsylvania. Bill came to Australia to work as a roughneck in a geological mining crew at Tennant Creek in 1970."