The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

by Ben Horowitz

managers got what we asked for, but not what we wanted. How did this happen?

The Art of War, warns that giving the team a task that it cannot possibly perform is called crippling the army.

make the hard decision up front, about what was more important, maximizing each quarter or increasing predictability. The instruction only made sense if the answer was the second one.

This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention.

the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool.

frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product.

but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.

Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not.

qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs.

HP got them now by sacrificing the future.

The company rewarded managers for achieving short-term objectives in a manner that was bad for the company.

white box goes beyond the numbers and gets into how the organization produced the numbers.

invest in the future even if that investment cannot b...

To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors.

Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create.

the side-effect behaviors may be worse than the situation you...

More important, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.

The short-term benefits are clear: you keep both employees, you don’t have to develop either because they will theoretically help each other develop, and you instantly close the skill set gap. Unfortunately, you will pay for those benefits with interest and at a very high rate.

If an engineer needs a decision made, which boss should she go to? If that boss decides, will the other boss be able to override it? If it’s a complex decision that requires a meeting, does she have to schedule both heads of engineering for the meeting? Who sets the direction for the organization? Will the direction actually get set if doing so requires a series of meetings?

you’ll either make a lump-sum payment by making the hard decision and putting one in the box or your engineering organization will suck forever.

She has friends in the company. When she got the offer from the other company, she consulted with her friends. One of her best friends advised her to take the offer.

People rarely improve weakness they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance. IN THE END Every really good, really experienced CEO I know shares one important characteristic: They tend to opt for the hard answer to organizational issues.

Why? Because they’ve paid the price of management debt, and they would rather not do that again.

paramount,

This the word ive been trying to remember for long. More important than anything ekse

first things you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good quality assurance organization cannot build a high-quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low quality product.

The best way to approach management quality assurance is through the lens of the employee life cycle.

From hire to retire, how good is your company? Is your management team world-class in all phases? How do you know?

Training and Integration When you hire an employee, how long does it take them to become productive from the perspective of the employee, her peers, and her manager? Shortly after joining, how well does an employee understand what’s expected of her?

ask for alladin

the head of HR must be a masterful process designer. One key to accurately measuring critical management processes is excellent process design and control.

Managers must believe that HR is there to help them improve rather than police them.

Industry knowledge Compensation, benefits, best recruiting practices, etc. are all fast-moving targets. The head of HR must be deeply networked in the industry and stay abreast of all the latest developments.

Lacking

heft

Lift or carry

I only had so much time with each employee and it was critically important that I be crystal clear in those moments. Nothing makes things clear like a few choice curse words.

lol i understand now

(On the other hand, it’s extremely bad if you don’t want your employees talking like a bunch of gangsta rappers.)

I’d developed CEO Tourette’s syndrome—the profanity was involuntary. Since the complaints seemed broad and deep,

My judgment was biased, because I was the main offender.

Lol

prohibiting it seemed both unrealistic and counterproductive. Attracting the very best engineers meant recruiting from highly profane environments.

I’ve said before that we cannot win unless we attract the very best people in the world. In the technology industry, almost everybody comes from a culture that allows profanity.

Shannon, ‘Those cupcakes you baked look delicious.’ But it is not okay for me to say to Anthony, ‘Hey, Cupcakes, you look mighty fine in them jeans.’ ” And that was all I said about that.

Hahah its how u took it..

Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.

Sometimes the right policy is the one that the CEO can follow.

Making it good at scale means admitting that it must be different and embracing the changes that you’ll need to make to keep things from falling apart.

As defined by Andy Grove, the right kind of ambition is ambition for the company’s success with the executive’s own success only coming as a by-product of the company’s victory. The wrong kind of ambition is ambition for the executive’s personal success regardless of the company’s outcome.

First, it will give the organization confidence that the company at least attempted to base the promotion on merit.

the process will produce the information necessary for your team to explain the promotion decisions you made.

If people in the company think that you agree that one of your executives is less than stellar, that information will spread quickly and without qualification. As a result, people will stop listening to the executive in question and the executive will soon become ineffective.

then there is a good chance that either the complainer or the targeted executive has a major problem.

they are telling you something that you already know, then the big news is that you have let the situation go too far.

Almost always, this means firing the executive. While I’ve seen executives improve their performance and skill sets, I’ve never seen one lose the support of the organization and then regain it.

Ka harsh but crucial

make clear to the complaining executive that you in no way agree with their assessment. You do not want to cripple the other executive before you reevaluate his performance. You do not want the complaint to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you’ve shut down the conversation, you must quickly reassess the employee in question.