When Larry told me during acquisition that Google would marshal the team and align their priorities with ours, he was 100 percent telling the truth. But what that looked like at Google was giving the team the skeleton of a plan and letting them fill in the rest as they went. Then they’d have a meeting every so often to ask how things were going.

But I had interpreted his words through an Apple lens. If Steve Jobs said he was going to marshal the team, that meant he was going to be there every step of the way—weekly, sometimes daily. He’d assemble everyone, tell them where to go, make sure they were marching together, and drag any stragglers back in place by sheer force of will.

In his first few weeks, he made appointments to talk with the top 20 percent of management - fifty people in all - for an hour each. “I’d start at seven in the morning and finish at eight, nine, ten o’clock at night,” he recalls. “I asked everyone the same question: ‘What do I need to know?’ Then I didn’t say a word the whole time, except to encourage them to keep going.

But through that coaching he also showed them how to coach their people and teams, which made them much more effective managers and leaders. Time and time again, they note that whenever they face an interesting situation, they ask themselves, what would Bill do? And we realized, we do it, too. What would Bill do? How would the coach handle this situation?

Dean Gilbert, a former executive at Google and @Home, and an accomplished management coach in his own right, notes that “Bill would build an envelope of trust very quickly. It was a natural thing for him, this ability to build rapport, a sense of comfort and protection. It’s the cornerstone of any coaching in business.

As Bill described it, his job as our coach was to “see little flaws in the organization that with a little massage we can make better. I listen, observe, and fill the communication and understanding gaps between people.