2014 - Hard Things About Hard Things
Leadership
Ben Horowitz
Summary
- Take care of employees, products, and profits - in that order.
- Management debt: when you make short-term management decisions, there will likely be an expensive long term consequence.
- When things fall apart, try the best ideas and never give up.
- Company culture: being a good company is non-essential when things are going well. But it can differentiate life and death when things go wrong.
- Hire for the right kind of ambition
- Minimize politics about pay, promotion and territory with well-designed processes.
- The purpose of the process is communication.
- What makes a great CEO?
Take care of employees, products, and profits - in that order.
If you devote real time, energy and money to developing the right people for your enterprise, then treat them responsibly and respectfully, they’re more likely to create great products that will deliver robust profits.
Effective employee training will improve productivity, performance management, product quality, and employee retention.
in poor workplaces, people spend most of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. Their job mandates are not clear and they have no way of knowing whether they are getting their jobs done.
Management debt: when you make short-term management decisions, there will likely be an expensive long term consequence.
Invest in the future. Don’t just create systems that work now but sacrifice your future ability to succeed.
Putting two in a box creates confusion like duplicating roles within the company.
When you overcompensate your employees, it will come back to haunt you.
When there is a vacuum of feedback, there is little chance that your company will perform optimally across the board.
When things fall apart, try the best ideas and never give up.
Remember that there is always a move. Focus and make the best move, even when there are no good moves.
Don’t put it all on your shoulders. Don’t convey only optimism; be honest about threats to the company. You can’t share everything, but remember that you don’t have to bear every burden alone.
Play long enough, and you might get lucky. The technology environment changes so fast that you might find the elusive answer another day if you can hang on.
Company culture: being a good company is non-essential when things are going well. But it can differentiate life and death when things go wrong.
Making it a pleasure to work for the company means people feel they can be effective and efficient in their work and make a difference.
Make the hard decisions quickly and don’t put them off.
Managers should deliver news of firings to their people with compassion; never outsource this task to HR.
True culture drives behavior.
Hire for the right kind of ambition
Put the company’s success before their personal interest.
Instead of hiring for a lack of weaknesses, hire for strengths.
Only thing that keeps an employee at a company when things go horribly wrong is that she likes her job, despite the hardships.
Hard to bring big company execs into little companies due to rhythm mismatch and skills mismatch.
Minimize politics about pay, promotion and territory with well-designed processes.
Keep up regular performance management and employee feedback with a good system of 1:1 meetings between the employees and managers.
Give opportunities for employees to expand their scope of responsibility.
Promote experienced employees by measuring results against objectives, skills, innovation, and partnership.
Don’t overcompensate an employee because they get a better job offer.
Be careful with gossip within the company. Systematically handle complaints.
The purpose of the process is communication.
Focus on the output first.
Figure out how you’ll know if you’re getting what you want at each step.
Engineer accountability into the system.
What makes a great CEO?
The ability to articulate a vision.
Having the right kind of ambition.
The ability to achieve the vision.