The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz

“If you have to eat sh*t, don’t nibble”.

The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz. A book about some of the challenges of being a CEO, particularly focusing on ‘war time’ problems. The author describes his story of getting through multiple potentially company-ending situations, culminating in a high value sale.

Key points:

• Promote the sharing of problems through transparency, which builds trust and therefore reduces amount of communication needed in an organisation
• It is uncommon to succeed after big firing due to change in culture in response. The process is for those who stay who see their friends treated well.
  • Do it quickly after the decision is made (as there are always leaks, or you have to deny it)
  • Use clear decisive language
• Firing executives is due to a failure of your hiring process i.e. having the wrong person for the job
  • Never ruin people’s reputation in the process
• Confront bad facts and don’t kid yourself
• Care about people, profit, product, in that order
• A good company is one where people can work hard and know it will improve the company and their lives
• Too often people hire for a lack of weaknesses, rather than presence of strengths (even though they may have other weaknesses)
• Pay raises out of cycle (or protocol) always get out
• Have highly disciplined structured promotion principles to avoid the Peter principle and the crappy person law
  • Peter principle = people are promoted to the point where they can no longer to the job
  • Crappy person law = performance at a level will converge on the lowest ability person within that job title
• The author puts a high priority on hiring excellent, talented people
• When hiring vs promoting, decide if you value inside or external knowledge more
• One of the key roles of a CEO is to design the communication architecture, which often involves 1-to-1 meetings: employee sends the agenda in advance and manager listens for 90% of the meeting
• If you’re going to eat shit, don’t nibble
• Don’t judge people based on what they might or might not be competent to do in the future, just continuously re-evaluate in the present
• Leadership is being able to: communicate vision, get people with ability to follow you, have competence to get job done

I enjoyed how this book focused in moderate depth on several topics that aren’t covered in such detail elsewhere.