More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Horowitz
Read between
April 8, 2018 - June 10, 2019
Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats,
The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do.
People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.”
the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
the clear and present social pressure often overwhelms the long-term benefits of organizing the company properly.
decisions only get scarier as a company grows.
Sometimes the decision itself is rather complicated, which makes the courage challenge even more difficult.
I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.
In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong versus doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified a thousandfold.
Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly.
the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
when it comes to CEO succession, internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates.
Knowledge of technology, prior decisions, culture, personnel, and more tends to be far more difficult to acquire than the skills required to manage a larger organization.
two core skills for running an organization: First, knowing what to do. Second, getting the company to do what you know.
Twos, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoy the process of making the company run well. They insist upon super-clear goals and strongly prefer not to change goals or direction unless absolutely necessary.
CEOs who are Twos, despite their love of action, can sometimes bring decision making in a company to a halt.
The primary purpose of the organizational hierarchy in a company is decision-making efficiency.
the most important attribute required to be a successful CEO is leadership.
“I know it when I see it.”
The ability to articulate the vision
The right kind of ambition
The ability to achieve the vision
Can the leader articulate a vision that’s interesting, dynamic, and compelling? More important, can the leader do this when things fall apart?
The first thing that any successful CEO must do is get really great people to work for her. Smart people do not want to work for people who do not have their interests in mind and in heart.
Truly great leaders create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares more about the employees than she cares about herself. In this kind of environment, an amazing thing happens: A huge number of employees believe it’s their company and behave accordingly. As the company grows large, these employees become quality control for the entire organization.
When you talk to Bill, you get the feeling that he cares deeply about you and what you have to say, because he does. And all of that shows up in his actions and follow-through.
(High Output Management),
They trusted him to rebuild their company around an entirely new business.
the enemy of competence is sometimes confidence. A CEO should never be so confident that she stops improving her skills.
If people trust you, they will listen to your vision even if it is less articulate. If you are super-competent, they will trust you and listen to you. If you can paint a brilliant vision, people will be patient with you as you learn the CEO skills and give you more leeway with respect to their interests.
Peacetime in business means those times when a company has a large advantage over the competition in its core market, and its market is growing.
In wartime, a company is fending off an imminent existential threat. Such a threat can come from a wide range of sources, including competition, dramatic macroeconomic change, market change, supply chain change, and so forth.
Only the Paranoid Survive.
through the transition was that peacetime and wartime require radically different management styles.
In wartime, by contrast, the company typically has a single bullet in the chamber and must, at all costs, hit the target. The company’s survival in wartime depends upon strict adherence and alignment to the mission.
there was no room for individual creativity outside the core mission.
Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win.
Wartime CEO is completely intolerant.
Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone.
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle.
Mastering both wartime and peacetime skill sets means understanding the many rules of management and knowing when to follow them and when to violate them.
management books tend to be written by management consultants who study successful companies during their times of peace.
CEO is an unnatural job.”
It generally takes years for a founder to develop the CEO skill set and it is usually extremely difficult for me to tell whether she will make it.
Learning to make this unnatural motion feel natural takes a great deal of practice. If you do what feels most natural as a CEO, you may also get knocked cold.
to be a good CEO, in order to be liked in the long run, you must do many things that will upset people in the short run. Unnatural things.
evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do.
Giving feedback turns out to be the unnatural atomic building block atop which the unnatural skill set of management gets built.
The basic idea is that people open up to feedback far more if you start by complimenting them (slice of bread number one), then you give them the difficult message (the shit), then wrap up by reminding them how much you value their strengths (slice of bread number two). The shit sandwich also has the positive side effect of focusing the feedback on the behavior rather than the person, because you establish up front that you really value the person. This is a key concept in giving feedback.
