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

by Ben Horowitz

figure out the complaining executive’s motivations and resolve them.

you should be on a track to remove the poor performer at that point.

While it may feel good in the moment to be open, responsive, and action oriented, be careful not to encourage all the wrong things.

As an employee, why would I want to work long hours to advance the career of my manager?

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.

managers with the right kind of ambition tend to be radically more valuable than those with the wrong kind.

Seuss’s management masterpiece Yertle the Turtle.

At a macro level, everybody views the world through her own personal prism.

He wanted to know the strengths and weaknesses of everyone else on the team.

It was clear that Mark was all about the team and its success.

While it may work to have individual employees who optimize for their own careers, counting on senior managers to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons is a dangerous idea.

When your head of sales interviews for her next job, she won’t want to say that despite the fact that she ran a global sales force with hundreds of employees, her title was “Dude.”

Hahaha

The rationale behind the law is that the other employees in the company with lower titles will naturally benchmark themselves against the crappiest person at the next level.

definition not only of the responsibilities at each level but also of the skill required to perform the duties.

Ba progression

First, he guarantees that every new employee gets releveled as they enter his company. In this way, he avoids accidentally giving new employees higher titles and positions than better-performing existing employees. This boosts morale and increases fairness.

he still wants to have an organization where the product people and engineers form the cultural core, so he strives to keep this in check as well.

that they miss out on precisely the employees they don’t want.

Facebook has so many advantages in recruiting employees that being disciplined about absolute title levels does not significantly impair its ability to attract the very best talent.

run a highly disciplined internal leveling and promotion process.

Rather than identifying weaknesses so that he can fix them, he looks for faults to build his case.

Sometimes these people actually make better CEOs than employees.

moonlighting

2nd job

Keeping a huge number of people on the same page executing the same goals is never easy.

belligerent

Hostike and aggressive

Even if nobody beats you to the punch, no matter how beautiful your dream most employees will lose faith after the first five or six years of not achieving it. Hiring someone who has already done what you are trying to do can radically speed up your time to success.

The proper reason to hire a senior person is to acquire knowledge and experience in a specific area.

whether you value inside knowledge or outside knowledge more for the position.

If you want to have a world-class company, you must make sure that the people on your staff—be they young or old—are world-class.

This is why you must look beyond the black-box results and into the sausage factory to see how things get made.

But if you want to make something from nothing, you have to take risks and you have to win your race against time. This means acquiring the very best talent, knowledge, and experience even if it requires dealing with some serious age diversity.

Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.

and even one-on-one meetings with managers and employees. Absent a well-designed communication architecture, information and ideas will stagnate, and your company will degenerate into a bad place to

most cases one-on-ones provide an excellent mechanism for information and ideas to flow up the organization and should be part of your design.

one-on-one meetings are a bad idea have been victims of poorly designed ones.

all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas, and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email, and other less personal and intimate mechanisms.

on an exciting but only 20 percent formed idea that you’re not sure is relevant, without sounding like a fool?

It also makes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as she needs.

the manager should try to draw the key issues out of the employee.

If you manage engineers, drawing out issues will be an important skill to master.

What’s the number-one problem with our organization? Why? What’s not fun about working here? Who is really kicking ass in the company? Whom do you admire? If you were me, what changes would you make? What don’t you like about the product? What’s the biggest opportunity that we’re missing out on? What are we not doing that we should be doing? Are you happy working here?

the most important thing is that the best ideas, the biggest problems, and the most intense employee life issues make their way to the people who can deal with them.

Very few products are ten times better than the competition’s, so unseating the new incumbent is much more difficult than unseating the old one.

It matters to the extent that it can help you achieve the above goals. 2. As your company grows, culture can help you preserve your key values, make your company a better place to work, and help it perform better in the future. 3. Perhaps most important, after you and your people go through the inhuman amount of work that it will take to build a successful company, it will be an epic tragedy if your company culture is such that even you don’t want to work there.

Why culture

Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change. Here are three examples:

“We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.”

there can be no great innovation without great risk.

If you’d rather be right than innovative, you won’t fit in at Facebook.

be sure that your mechanism agrees with your values.

Every smart company values its employees. Perks are good, but they are not culture.

knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want.