In 1997, soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, following a twelve-year absence, he asked Campbell to become the company’s lead outside director. Campbell became both Jobs’s mentor and perhaps his closest confidante. Most Sundays they took long walks in the hills around Palo Alto. Although he was neither an employee nor a director, for more than a decade Larry Page and Sergey Brin invited him to attend Monday meetings of Google’s senior executive team as well as board-of-director meetings. In the early days of Google, as happened at Amazon, board members pressured Page and Brin to hire an experienced C.E.O. They resisted, until Doerr, with Campbell’s help, recruited Eric Schmidt. The new C.E.O. would often say that without Campbell, who served as both a sounding board and a trusted emissary to the founders, that marriage might have collapsed.
Like Winfrey, Horowitz saw Campbell as both a great listener and a person who instantly instilled trust, communicating to the person he was with that his only interest was them.
Source: Postscript: Bill Campbell, 1940-2016 – The New Yorker
Related