Reading: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

When you think of Netscape, those of us old enough to remember the browser, thinks of Marc Andreessen. But at Netscape (and Opsware), he was joined by Ben Horowitz. Together they founded venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz. This book is a compilation of the lessons that Ben Horowitz learned at those companies, and that he is sharing with us.

The book is a must read for startups and growth ceo’s.  It’s not a book written by a management guru, but by someone who has been in the trenches and doubtless had a lot of sleepless nights figuring out how to make his company survive. There’s a lot of advise for CEO’s in there, ranging from how to direct your company through rough times, to minimising politics in your company.

Some of the highlights that I found worthwhile:

Crediting Grove – It was interesting that in the book Ben Horowitz makes a number of references to the works of Andy Grove, name “High output management” and “Only the paranoid survive“. Andy turned Intel around from a memory company to the biggest chip company in the world, so pay attention, and read his work too.

Lead bullets – “Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.” “There’s not always a magical way out of your problems. Sometimes you just have to knuckle down and keep on going with all that you have.” The other interesting quote in this section was:

“There comes a time in every company’s life when it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself: “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?” if you have the better product, why not knuckle up and go to war?”

War and Peace – what CEO are you? – A peacetime CEO will focus on expanding the market  and company’s strength. A wartime CEO is fending off immediate and existential threats (read Only the paranoid survive to catch up on strategic inflection points) . Can one CEO be both? You can read more on wartime versus peacetime CEO’s here.

People Product Profit – In that order. Take care of your people first, they are the ones that will make your product win, and in turn realise your profit.

A Market of ONE – The most important rule of raising money privately, look for a market of one. You only need one investor to believe in you and invest

2 kinds of friends – You need 2 kinds of friends in your life: one with real excitement, and a second kind of friend to call when things go horribly wrong. When your life is on the line and you only have 1 phone call to make, who’s it going to be?

If you’re going to eat shit, don’t nibble – Pretty straightforward!

Don’t believe in statistics – Startup ceo’s should not play the odds. Don’t believe in statistics, believe in calculus. Secret of a successful CEO? There is one skill: focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.

Ask for problems – Build a culture that rewards, not punishes people to bring problems in the open where they can be solved. The “old management standards” say “don’t bring me a problem without bringing a solution”. Well, if the employee had the solution, he wouldn’t need to bring it to the manager now, would he?

Time – spend zero time on what you could have done and spend all of your time on what you can do. Because in the end, nobody cares

Product Managers – good product managers think in terms of delivering superior value to the market place during product planning and  achieving market share and revenues goals during the go to market phase.

Hiring senior people in your company – When do you need to start hiring senior people, what types, advantages and disadvantages? Also an Andy Grove quote that hits home: the peter principle is unavoidable (full quote: “the Peter Principle is unavoidable, because there is no way to know a priori at what level in the hierarchy a manager will be incompetent“). The author gives some good advice on how to check if they are doing a good job, and when and why you need senior people. He addresses the questions like “won’t they ruin the culture with their costumes, political ambitions and the need to go home to see their family?” Maybe yes, but bringing in the right kind of experience at the right time can mean the difference between bankruptcy and glory. You’ll need a new executive to be more than a goal achiever, he/she needs to be part of the team. The CEO needs to evaluate people on current role, and nobody comes out of the womb knowing how to manage a 100 people. Managing at scale is a learned skill rather than a natural ability, and it’s nearly impossible to make judgement in advance.

The shit sandwich – from “the one minute manager” – go look it up. 🙂

Be honest but courteous with feedback – if you think a presentation sucks, just say it and give the reasons why. Watered down feedback is worse than no feedback at all. But… don’t go and show off your superiority.

What’s your story – a company without a story is usually a company without a strategy (see the amazon example – it’s amazing, Jeff Bezos wrote this in 1997!)

 

the hard thing about hard things

Personal brand and personal brain

You are what you tweet. How to work on your personal brand online, throught Fast Company. Using social networking to build your professional brand. I’m not sure if I’d follow the advice to “find five new people to follow or connect with every day”. That’s 1825 people a year, or 18250 over 10 years… that’s a lot of people to interact with…

http://www.fastcompany.com/1805231/u-r-what-u-tweet-5-steps-to-a-better-personal-brand

 

“Personal Brain” from The Brain company. Read good things about it. Trying it out, not seeing the benefits of it (yet).

http://www.thebrain.com/products/personalbrain/

Steve Jobs on marketing & identifying your core values

Steve Jobs on marketing & identifying your core values

Next to the products, Steve Jobs also drove the marketing of Apple relentlessly forward.

Click here to read the article and see the presentation on how he talks about getting the company back on message, after he took the helm of the company again.

Once you’re done with that, check out Guy Kawasaki’s post on things he learned from Steve Jobs. It’s an interesting and thought provoking read. I especially like the first two: expert are clueless, and customers cannot tell you what they need.

 

One more argument against multitasking

We may think we multitask, but in reality we switch-task, and it’s not doing us any good, according to an article at HBR.

 

  • The author of the article stopped multitasking, and discovered six things:
  • First, it was delightful.
  • Second, he made significant progress on challenging projects.
  • Third, his stress dropped dramatically.
  • Fourth, he lost all patience for things he felt were not a good use of his time.
  • Fifth, he had tremendous patience for things he felt were useful and enjoyable.
  • Sixth, there was no downside.

 

Frustrated office work at his desk — Image by © Blue Jean Images/Corbis

Personal social media strategies

Personal social media strategies

Harvard Business Review has an interesting article on personal social media strategies.

The first example in the article really drives it home. Even if you don’t have a social media strategy yourself, or are not active on social media, others that talk to you are, and they may quote whatever you say to them on twitter or in the blogosphere.

Thank about it next time you’re at a conference. Would you want your boss, co-workers or customers to read what you just said?

 

The Abilene paradox

The previous post on the Asoh defense led me to another real gem, the Abilene paradox.

Where I work, they have something called “disagree and commit“. It’s a good principle if it works, and when there is ample time to discuss, as this post explains. It tends to get a bit scary when the discussion bit is omitted (by fear of displeasing management or whatever the reason may be), and people end up with the Abilene paradox. This is a paradox in which a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of any of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group’s and do not raise objections. Scary, isn’t it? The paradox is usually inllustrated by the below story:

“On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests that they take a trip to Abilene [53 miles north] for dinner. The wife says, “Sounds like a great idea.” The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, “Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go.” The mother-in-law then says, “Of course I want to go. I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.”

The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.

One of them dishonestly says, “It was a great trip, wasn’t it.” The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, “I wasn’t delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of you.” The wife says, “I just went along to keep you happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that.” The father-in-law then says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.”

Sounds familiar?