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The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Building A Business When There Are No Easy Answers
These blinks explain why the job of a CEO is among the toughest and loneliest in the world, and how you can survive all the stress and heartache involved.
- Present or future CEOs and founders
- Anyone who wants to understand how businesses are run successfully
- Anyone who is ever in a position where they have to hire or fire someone
Ben Horowitz is a founding partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, he was a co-founder and CEO at the IT company Opsware, which he eventually sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for $1.6 billion. His blog has over 10 million readers.
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The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Building A Business When There Are No Easy Answers
- Read in 22 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 14 key ideas
Synopsis
These blinks explain why the job of a CEO is among the toughest and loneliest in the world, and how you can survive all the stress and heartache involved.
Key idea 1 of 14
Every CEO must deal with the pressures and responsibilities that come with running a company.
Everyone who founds a company or runs one as the CEO has dreams. Usually these dreams revolve around building something beautiful and world-changing while having fun and making a lot of money.
Unfortunately, no company progresses smoothly along this path, as crises are an inevitable part of building a business; there are simply too many variables and things to go wrong for smooth sailing.
For example, every company is somewhat at the mercy of “macro” issues like financial crises and collapses which can scare away investors, as well as smaller “micro” issues such as making a wrong hiring decision or having your best customer go bankrupt.
This is where all CEOs meet The Struggle, which occurs when dreams of success meet reality.
The Struggle is an inevitable part of being in charge of a company, and it consists of the stress and the impossible decisions that come with the territory. The stress and weight of The Struggle will probably affect the CEO’s entire life, from her mental and physical well-being to her career choices and social relationships.
All this makes The Struggle extremely draining, but it is also where greatness arises. Ultimately, the CEO is responsible for negotiating the challenges the company faces, and thus it is she who will get credit for the company’s successes or be fired for its failures.
Key ideas in this title
- Every CEO must deal with the pressures and responsibilities that come with running a company.
- The Struggle can seem unbearable at times, but teamwork, creativity and a solution orientation help.
- Being honest about problems and bad news in your company will help you find solutions quickly.
- Nobody wants to lay people off, but if necessary, it must be done quickly and fairly.
- When you fire an executive, take responsibility for the mis-hire and ensure continuity of the business.
- Take care of the people in your company by training them well and building a good human resources structure.
- Hire people based on their strengths, not their weaknesses.
- Build a good company where people want to work: dispense with politics.
- The key for leading an organization is knowing what to do and getting the organization to do it.
- There are two different kinds of CEOs: decision makers and implementers.
- Depending on a company’s circumstances, it needs either a Peacetime CEO or a Wartime CEO.
- You can learn to be a great CEO though it will feel uncomfortable at first.
- Selling your company means you must surmount both emotional and rational obstacles.
- Final summary
