The Hard Thing About Hard Things summary

As you know, all CEOs must face The Struggle. Happily, there are a few strategies that can help you deal with it.

First of all, even though as the CEO the burden of The Struggle will fall more heavily on you than anyone else, try not to bear the weight alone. Instead, involve as many people as possible when you face a crisis.

No one likes giving bad news. But when you’re the CEO and your company is dealing with challenges, discussing them with your workforce openly and directly is crucial for success.

Why?

One of the tasks every CEO dreads is having to lay people off. However, it is inevitable you’ll face this task, and how you handle it will have a great impact on the company.

First of all, when layoffs are needed, it’s important to be fast. As soon as the decision has been made, action must be taken – delaying layoffs that everyone knows are coming is like letting a wound fester.

When a company hits hard times, it is not only the workforce who may be laid off. Sometimes, CEOs must also fire executives, which is a much more difficult and serious task than firing anyone else because there is more at stake for the company both financially and culturally.

So how should you fire an executive?

Many companies emphasize in their communications that people are important to them, but not all seem to truly understand that a great organization really can only be achieved by taking good care of its people. They are more important than your products or your profits.

So how can you take better care of your people?

Anyone who has ever had to hire someone knows that selecting the right candidate is far from easy. Indeed, recruiting the right people is a matter of life and death for any company. So how can you do this well?

When recruiting, your first priority should be hiring people for their strengths, not rejecting them for their weaknesses. After all, the strengths are what will help the person excel at the job.

Every CEO and founder wants their company to be a place where people are happy to work.

So how can you make this happen?

It’s no coincidence that the biographies of successful CEOs are in high demand; clearly it is a highly demanding role to fulfill.

So what constitutes a great CEO?

No two great leaders are exactly alike. It is, however, possible to broadly categorize them based on their approach to leadership as either Ones or Twos.

Ones are leaders whose approach is more focused on defining a path for the organization to follow than on implementing it. Typically, founding CEOs are Ones. A classic example of a One is Bill Gates, who defined a compelling long-term vision for Microsoft.

No doubt you’ve seen countless management books written by CEOs and business leaders. The problem is that most of these books relate to businesses where the direction to pursue is relatively clear and the business is focused on capturing market share from competitors.

But what these books forget is that many businesses find themselves in much more dire straits. The circumstances the company faces largely dictate the kind of management approach required. This means a company may need a Peacetime CEO or a Wartime CEO.

CEOs are mysterious creatures. When company boards or venture capitalists try to evaluate the quality of a CEO, they’re often at a total loss. They may wonder, for example, whether great CEOs are born or whether someone can grow into the role.

The truth is of course that CEOs grow into the job: to lead a company, they must develop the right characteristics and skills for that particular job. This means it’s almost impossible to tell if a CEO will be successful beforehand. Great CEOs do tend to exhibit certain general traits though, which you should also try to emulate.

Many entrepreneurs dream of one day selling their company and retiring. But when they finally receive an offer, they often waver, because by that time they feel deeply connected to the living, breathing entity they’ve created.

So how do you know if you should sell your company?