THE HARD THINGABOUT HARD THINGS ~ Ben Horowitz
People ask me ‘what’s the hardest thing about being a successful CEO?’. Sadly, there is no secret.
If there is one skill that stands out it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.There is no answer to “the struggle”, but here are some things that helped me:
Don’t put it all on your shoulders. It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That’s not true. The opposite is true.
Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you. You won’t be able to share every burden, but share every burden that you can.
Get the maximum number of brains on the problems even if the problems represent existential threats. When I ran Opsware and we were losing too many competitive deals, I called an all hands and told the whole company that we were getting our a**es kicked, and if we didn’t stop the bleeding, we were going to die. Nobody blinked. The team rallied, built a winning product, and saved my sorry a**.
This is not checkers; this is chess. Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2 million in trailing revenue and 340 employees, with a plan to do $75 million in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash left.
There is always a move.Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.
Don’t take it personally. The predicament that you are in is probably all your fault. You hired the people. You made the decisions. But you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.
Everybody makes mistakes. Every CEO makes thousands of mistakes. Evaluating yourself and giving yourself an F doesn’t help.
Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge.
If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.
ARE YOU COMMITTED to DOING WHATEVER IT TAKES to GO OUT THERE and get your UNFAIR SHARE of whatever market we are in?