The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz · 2014
Silicon Valley veteran Ben Horowitz throws out the management cookbook and gets honest about the brutal, no-good-options decisions that define real leadership: laying people off, demoting a friend, betting the company on a single move. A field manual for the moments that have no formula.
Candid, battle-tested wisdom on the toughest leadership and management decisions in business.
Three of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of The Hard Thing About Hard Things pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first three.
- There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets: when a competitor has a better product, stop hunting for a clever escape and do the hard, unglamorous work of building something better.
- Run your priorities as people, products, profits in that order, and treat being a great place to work as a survival strategy, not a perk.
- Learn to switch between Peacetime and Wartime leadership: empower and build consensus when you're winning, but go decisive, detailed, and intolerant of drift when survival is on the line.
The other 4 — and the full 9-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 9 minutes, read or listened to.
- From Loudcloud to Opsware: A Story of Survival
- Embrace the Struggle
- There Are No Silver Bullets, Only Lead Bullets
- Take Care of People, Products, and Profits: In That Order
- The Hardest Conversations: Layoffs, Demotions, and Firing Executives
- Wartime CEO, Peacetime CEO
- Minimize Politics and Pay Down Management Debt
- Hiring, Training, and Managing Your People
- The Lessons That Stay With You
Finish The Hard Thing About Hard Things tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 9 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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