What Three Days at Stanford Taught Me About Leadership, Branding, and the Coach Who Changed Silicon Valley

Reflections from the 2025 William V. Campbell Trophy Leadership Summit

By David McMahon  ·  davidmcmahon.com  ·  Leadership & Reputation

There is a particular feeling that comes from being in a room full of people who have thought deeply about the same things you have spent your career trying to figure out. Not because they have all the answers, but because they are still asking the questions. That is what three days at the William V. Campbell Trophy Leadership Summit at Stanford University feels like, and it is why I keep going back.

2025 was my third consecutive year attending the Summit, hosted by the National Football Foundation and sponsored by Intuit, where Bill Campbell served as President and CEO for four transformative years before becoming the most influential coach Silicon Valley never fully saw coming. The Summit gathers former Campbell Trophy nominees alongside some of the most accomplished leaders in business, technology, and public service. The conversations are honest. The speakers are exceptional. And the thread connecting all of it is a man who believed, above everything else, that the purpose of leadership is to make the people around you better.

I want to share three sessions that stayed with me long after I landed back in Sarasota. Not because they were the most polished presentations I have ever seen, but because they confirmed things I had been practicing by instinct and gave me language for the framework I have been building for fifteen years.

Scott Brady: The Intersection of AI, Innovation, and What It Actually Takes to Build

Scott Brady co-founded Innovation Endeavors with Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and has spent his career at the intersection of transformative technology and the human infrastructure required to deploy it. His background spans serving as CEO of publicly traded tech companies, teaching venture formation at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and backing some of the most ambitious startups in the market today, including companies working on vertical farming, satellite IoT, and AI-driven materials discovery.

What struck me about Brady was not his roster of credentials. It was his insistence on what does not change when everything else is changing. The conversation around AI right now tends toward two poles: unbridled enthusiasm about what the technology can do, and understandable anxiety about what it might displace. Brady navigated both with the kind of clarity that comes from actually building things rather than theorizing about them.

His connection to Schmidt and the broader Google ecosystem gave the AI conversation unusual texture. This is not someone watching AI from the outside. This is someone who has been embedded in the world that built the infrastructure the AI revolution is running on. And his message, beneath the specifics, was one I have carried into my own work: technology does not replace the judgment, relationships, and character of the people deploying it. The organizations that win with AI are the ones that pair it with a culture worth preserving. The ones that lose are the ones that use it to avoid the harder work of building that culture in the first place.

I deployed AI tools at NetReputation in mid-2023 to modernize suppression delivery, client onboarding, and reporting. What I learned in that process tracks exactly with what Brady was describing. The technology made us faster. It made our reporting cleaner. It made our onboarding more consistent. But it did not make our client relationships stronger. That work still happened the same way it always did: through honest conversations, follow-through, and showing up when things got complicated.

AI amplifies what is already there. If your culture is strong, it scales your strengths. If your culture is weak, it scales your weaknesses faster.

Denise Lee Yohn: Why Your Brand Is Not What You Say It Is

Denise Lee Yohn is a brand leadership expert whose work, particularly her books What Great Brands Do and FUSION, sits on the shelf of anyone who has thought seriously about the relationship between organizational culture and customer experience. Her talk at the Summit was one of the sessions I was most looking forward to, and it delivered in a way I did not fully anticipate.

The core of her argument is deceptively simple and consistently underestimated: your brand is not your logo, your tagline, or your marketing campaign. Your brand is the sum of every experience your customers and employees have with your organization. Every single touchpoint. And the companies that build enduring brands are the ones that align their internal culture so completely with their external promise that there is no gap between what they say and what people actually feel when they interact with them.

What resonated most, in a room full of former athletes and coaches, was her framing of empathy as a strategic brand asset, not a soft skill to be bolted on at the end of a customer journey. Her argument is that the brands that customers trust most are the ones that have genuinely tried to understand what their customers experience, including when things go wrong, and have built systems to respond to that understanding rather than just manage the optics of it.

This connected directly to work I have been doing for years in online reputation management. The businesses with the strongest reputations I have encountered are not the ones with the most polished marketing. They are the ones whose internal team culture genuinely reflects the values they project externally. When a customer calls with a problem and the person who answers actually cares about solving it, that is not customer service training. That is brand-culture alignment. Denise gave me sharper language for what I had been observing and doing by instinct.

Your brand can’t just be a promise. It’s built and rebuilt daily through honesty, empathy, and the courage to act on what you hear.

She also made a point that is directly applicable to anyone building a team: the customer experience you deliver is almost always a direct reflection of the employee experience you provide. You cannot ask your people to show up for your customers in ways that your organization does not show up for them. The inside has to match the outside. That principle has informed how I think about retention, onboarding, and performance feedback on my own team, and hearing it articulated with that clarity was one of those moments where you write three things in the margin at once.

Randy Komisar: Bill Campbell Was Right, and Here Is Why It Still Matters

If Scott Brady gave the Summit its forward-looking energy and Denise Lee Yohn gave it its brand and customer experience framework, Randy Komisar gave it its soul.

Komisar is a Kleiner Perkins partner, a former CEO, a Stanford professor, and the author of The Monk and the Riddle. He is also one of the people who knew Bill Campbell most closely, having co-founded Claris with Campbell and worked alongside him through some of the most consequential moments in Silicon Valley history. His session at the 2025 Summit was titled Inspired by Bill Campbell to Lead with Compassion, Empathy and Fairness, and it was exactly that.

What Komisar did in that room was something harder than delivering a polished talk about leadership principles. He made Bill Campbell present. He talked about Campbell the way people talk about someone they genuinely miss, someone whose absence you feel in the specific, daily ways that abstract tribute never quite captures. He talked about how Campbell made business interesting by making it about people rather than money. He talked about how Campbell understood that the right thing and the smart thing are not always the same, and that leaders who are very good at rationalizing tend to be the ones most at risk of doing the wrong thing brilliantly.

Bill wasn’t a guy with a big theory. He was somebody who connected incredibly well with who you were and what you needed and was able to get you there.

The three principles Komisar kept returning to, compassion, empathy, and fairness, are not complicated on their face. What Campbell made clear, and what Komisar made clear again in that room, is that they are not easy to practice consistently under pressure. Compassion means caring about the person, not just the performance. Empathy means actually trying to understand someone’s experience before you respond to it. Fairness means applying the same standards to everyone, including yourself, even when it is inconvenient.

These are the qualities Bill Campbell was known for at Columbia, at Apple, at Intuit, and in every executive relationship he built across four decades. And they are the qualities that, according to everyone who knew him, made people want to do their best work. Not because they feared him, but because they did not want to let him down. That is a specific kind of leadership that does not come from a playbook. It comes from character, built over time, tested under pressure, and practiced with consistency.

For me, Komisar’s session was the connective tissue of the entire Summit. The Trillion Dollar Coach framework that runs through the Summit’s DNA, published by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle, documents Campbell’s 33 principles in sharp, actionable language. But Komisar reminded the room that the principles are less important than the intention behind them. Campbell did not lead with compassion because it was a strategy. He led with compassion because he believed in people. The principles are the visible expression of something that has to actually be true about who you are.

What I Brought Home

I have attended this Summit three times now. Each year I leave with something different, but I leave with something real. In 2023, the conversations about authentic leadership helped me articulate what I had been practicing by instinct at NetReputation. In 2024, the focus on team building and what makes organizations durable in the face of rapid change pushed me to be more deliberate about how I develop the people around me. In 2025, Brady, Denise Lee Yohn, and Komisar together gave me a more integrated framework for thinking about the relationship between culture, brand, technology, and leadership character.

The thread running through all three sessions is one that Bill Campbell embodied and that the Summit exists to keep alive: organizations are built by people, for people, and they rise or fall on the quality of the relationships and the culture that holds them together. The technology changes. The markets shift. The products evolve. But the fundamental question of whether the people inside your organization trust each other, believe in what they are building, and feel genuinely supported in doing their best work, that question never changes. It just gets harder to answer when everything else is moving fast.

I am registered for the 2026 Summit and excited this year to be able to bring my wife. And I am genuinely grateful to Steve Hatchell, Mark Flynn, Hillary Jeffries, and the National Football Foundation for building something that keeps getting better.

If you have watched the Randy Komisar session or Denise Lee Yohn’s talk on branding and customer empathy and want to discuss how any of these ideas apply to your own organization or reputation strategy, I would enjoy the conversation.

David McMahon is a Sarasota-based executive, three-time Campbell Trophy Summit attendee, and your favorite Chief Reputation Officer. He writes about leadership, reputation, and building teams worth being part of at davidmcmahon.com.

● RESOURCES & LINKS

Watch the Sessions

Randy Komisar — Inspired by Bill Campbell to Lead with Compassion, Empathy & Fairness (2025 Summit)  https://youtu.be/SdtLqDCvwJM

Denise Lee Yohn — Branding & Empathy’s Impact on Customer Experience  https://youtu.be/r7b3uH_IyFU

Scott Brady & Innovation Endeavors

Innovation Endeavors (website):  https://www.innovationendeavors.com

Scott Brady at Stanford GSB:  https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/scott-brady

Denise Lee Yohn — Books & Website

Official website:  https://www.deniseleeyohn.com

What Great Brands Do (Amazon):  https://www.amazon.com/dp/111861125X

FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies (Amazon):  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1473676983

Randy Komisar — Books & Resources

The Monk and the Riddle (Amazon):  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1578516447

Trillion Dollar Coach — The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell (Amazon):  https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062839268

The Campbell Trophy Summit & NFF

National Football Foundation (website):  https://www.footballfoundation.org

Campbell Trophy Summit (official):  https://www.campbelltrophysummit.org

Trillion Dollar Coach (official book site):  https://www.trilliondollarcoach.com