The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
Leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity
Key Takeaways:
Embrace the Struggle
Running a business, especially a startup, is inherently filled with challenges and setbacks. There is a distinct need to embrace the struggle than avoid it. Acknowledge that feeling overwhelmed is part of the journey toward achieving great things. Instead of fearing the struggle, dive into it. Use it as an opportunity to learn, grow, and innovate. When you’re faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, break them down into manageable tasks, and tackle each one step by step. The path to extraordinary success is bound to be paved with hardships, and how you respond to these challenges defines your potential for growth.
Focus on What You Can Control
In the face of adversity, focus your energy on aspects that you can influence rather than worrying about uncontrollable factors. Start by identifying the elements of the situation you can directly impact. This might mean reallocating resources, changing your approach, or enhancing your skills and those of your team. For instance, if market conditions are unfavourable, pivot your strategies to what can actually be improved—like customer experience or operational efficiency. Make a habit of asking yourself, "What’s one thing I can improve right now?" This mindset will keep you proactive and resilient.
Take Care of the People, the Products, and the Profits—in that order
There is an immense need to prioritise people before products and profits. Happy and motivated employees are the backbone of any successful business. Invest in building a positive company culture where your team feels valued and supported. Implement regular feedback loops and be transparent about company challenges and successes. Also, provide opportunities for professional development to help your employees grow alongside the company. Remember, when your team thrives, they bring their best selves to work, leading to better products and, ultimately, better profits.
Don’t Put It All on Your Shoulders
The burden of leadership can be overwhelming if you try to handle everything alone. Delegation is not just a necessity; it’s an art. Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your team, and delegate accordingly. Trusting your team with critical tasks not only empowers them but also frees up your time to focus on strategic directions. Regularly check in on delegated tasks with a balance of oversight and autonomy, allowing your team members to own their responsibilities fully. This balance will cultivate a strong sense of trust and collective responsibility within your team.
Make Decisions Well, Not Fast
Good decision-making is crucial, but it's more important to make well-considered decisions than to make quick decisions.When faced with a decision, gather as much information as possible and weigh your options carefully. Consult with your team, mentors, or industry peers to gain different perspectives. Use data-driven insights to inform your choices whenever possible. Don’t decide until you absolutely have to. Making a decision too quickly can be as detrimental as delaying one for too long. Aim for a balanced approach where due diligence guides your speed.
Notable Passages:
“Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More important, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt”
“No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be?”
“There’s no recipe for really complicated, dynamic situations. There’s no recipe for building a high-tech company; there’s no recipe for leading a group of people out of trouble; there’s no recipe for making a series of hit songs; there’s no recipe for playing NFL quarterback; there’s no recipe for running for president; and there’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.”
“As a corollary, beware of management maxims that stop information from flowing freely in your company. For example, consider the old management standard: “Don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution.” What if the employee cannot solve an important problem? For example, what if an engineer identifies a serious flaw in the way the product is being marketed? Do you really want him to bury that information? Management truisms like these may be good for employees to aspire to in the abstract, but they can also be the enemy of free-flowing information—which may be critical for the health of the company.”
“There are several different frameworks one could use to get a handle on the indeterminate vs. determinate question. The math version is calculus vs. statistics. In a determinate world, calculus dominates. You can calculate specific things precisely and deterministically. When you send a rocket to the moon, you have to calculate precisely where it is at all times. It’s not like some iterative startup where you launch the rocket and figure things out step by step. Do you make it to the moon? To Jupiter? Do you just get lost in space? There were lots of companies in the ’90s that had launch parties but no landing parties. “But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.”
“Get it out of your head and onto paper. When I had to explain to my board that, since we were a public company, I thought that it would be best if we sold all of our customers and all of our revenue and changed business, it was messing with my mind. In order to finalize that decision, I wrote down a detailed explanation of my logic. The process of writing that document separated me from my own psychology and enabled me to make the decision swiftly. Focus on the road, not the wall. When someone learns to drive a race car, one of the first lessons taught is that when you are going around a curve at 200 mph, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company is like that. There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely crash your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.”
“Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company. The architecture might include the organizational design, meetings, processes, email, yammer, 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 work. While it is quite possible to design a great communication architecture without one-on-one meetings, in 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.”
“The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least ten times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.”
“Much has been written about process design, so I won’t repeat that here. I have found the “The Basics of Production,” the first chapter of Andy Grove’s High Output Management, to be particularly helpful. For new companies, here are a few things to keep in mind: Focus on the output first. What should the process produce?”
Quotable Quotes
“The purpose of process is communication. If there are five people in your company, you don’t need process, because you can just talk to each other.”
“The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed.”
“The difference between being mediocre and magical is often the difference between letting people take creative risk and holding them too tightly accountable. Accountability is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important.”
“When you get really big, you’ll need to decide whether to organize the entire company around functions (for example, sales, marketing, product management, engineering) or around missions—self-contained business units that contain multiple functions.”
“As organizations grow large, important work can go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and bureaucratic processes can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy.”
“Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”
“What do I mean by politics? I mean people advancing their careers or agendas by means other than merit and contribution. There may be other types of politics, but politics of this form seem to be the ones that really bother people.”
“Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything. There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience”
“In technology companies, when the employees disappear, the spiral begins: The company declines in value, the best employees leave, the company declines in value, the best employees leave. Spirals are extremely difficult to reverse.”
“Embrace your weirdness, your background, your instinct. If the keys are not in there, they do not exist.”
About Me:
I write to learn. More about me here. Follow @hackrlife on X