Alan Eagle

Alan Eagle spent over 16 years at Google working alongside some of the most influential leaders in the world. He sat in rooms with the fathers of the internet, coached executives through failure, and helped capture the leadership philosophy of Bill Campbell — the man behind the curtain at Google, Apple, and Silicon Valley for three decades. When Alan talks about what separates good performers from great ones, it is worth slowing down for.

Alan left three things on the table worth picking up.

The first came from Eric Schmidt — Google's CEO during its most defining decade of growth. On Alan's first day as his speechwriter, Eric walked in and asked one question before anything else: What is the most interesting thing I can say? Not what is my agenda. Not what do I need to sell. Most communication fails because the speaker is thinking about themselves. Eric flipped it. People want to be entertained or educated. That reframe — applied to a speech, a meeting, a sales call, a conversation — changes everything about how you show up.

The second is ship and iterate. Ship your product, then get back to work. Most people treat completion as arrival — the event ends, the project launches, the goal gets checked, and there's a quiet exhale. That exhale is fine. What comes next is the problem. The Dodgers won the World Series and took maybe two days to celebrate before asking how they could get better. That's not a lack of gratitude, but the discipline of understanding that excellence is a practice.

The third is the simplest. After every event, Google's team would debrief with "one up" (one thing that went well) and "one to improve." That's it. Most people skip this step entirely. They move on, repeat the same mistakes, and wonder why the needle isn't moving. Positive, specific, forward-facing — it's a tool you can use after anything. A meeting, a presentation, an event, a conversation that didn't go the way you planned.

The best version of what you're building hasn't been built yet.