Ben Horowitz: Quit being a coward and do the hard thing

A lot of management books emphasize things that are, like, reasonably obvious

How do you do goals and objectives and OKRs and mission statements and delegation

Things that you need, like, a mildly good eighth-grade education to do

But that's not where people run into trouble. They really run into trouble on, like, very, very complicated emotional things

where the emotion prevents them from doing the thing that they intellectually know they need to do

So this could be firing a friend or doing a reorganization that causes a very talented employee

to lose power and get upset with you or not give somebody a raise who you really like

but isn't the person on the team that deserves a raise. These things are much more difficult

and people often avoid them, But as a leader, you're much better off running at your fear than running away from your fear because it's going to chase you down

Hello, I'm Ben Horowitz, founding partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and author of the bestselling book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Management debt is what happens when you don't do what you're supposed to

I should fire that person but that going to be very very messy so I going to blow it off I should fill this executive position but I also busy with other things so I going to let that go And the problem is that debt causes knock effects

So you don't just have the problem of the bad executive or bad manager that you didn't fire

Now that debt creates an employee satisfaction problem among everybody on that team

And then the reputation of that team starts to degrade inside the organization

And so now that team can't be effective with other teams. And then you start to have attrition on that team because nobody wants to work in an organization with a bad manager that nobody else in the organization respects

These things cascade and pretty soon it's very, very difficult to kind of get out from under it

So it's why I always like to say, you know, you need to run towards the pain and darkness and not away from it

And I think the best leaders always run towards the darkness. They always run towards a problem

They never run away from it. And the ones that fail, you know, always hesitate

In peacetime, a business has a product that's working. Customers love it

There's not really serious competition. There's plenty of money in the bank

And so what you're really trying to do is say, okay, how can I take this great opportunity that I have

and scale it up? How can, you know, I enable the organization to do more

and do it without me kind of getting in the way and slowing it down

And so most management techniques are oriented around this. But in a wartime situation there a 10x change in the competition the supply chain the financial macroeconomic environment

And in this scenario, those techniques have to be changed very rapidly and you can't have a peacetime persona as a leader

An example, you know, I was on the board of a company that had lost a huge portion of their revenue during COVID

And in the board meeting, the proposal from the HR department was

gee, because we lost so much revenue, the stock dropped in half

Therefore, the offers that we made to employees were worth half what they were worth

And so we have to give all the employees more stock. And that was a very peacetime idea

Keep everybody in the boat. We have to retain people, et cetera. But we're in wartime now

And what I told the CEO is, look, you're trying to keep everybody in the boat because that's what you told your team to do, keep everybody in the boat

But your boat is leaking and it's 3,000 miles from shore and you're never going to make it to shore if everybody stays in the boat

So the last thing you want to do is keep everybody in the boat. You need to start throwing people overboard

If they want to jump, that's awesome. The last thing you want to do is give everybody more stock options

Like maybe there's a few people that you got to have, but other than that

you got to let them go. This is war. This is no longer peacetime. When you're reading a case study

about a business you know everything because it over and you looking backwards through history And so it very easy to make those decisions in retrospect But when you going forward in time

you have less than complete information, often less than 10% of the data that you would like to

have. And then employees or people from the outside, the board, the customers, the public

the press, think that they know the decision. None of them have as much information as you or as

much context as you. So it takes courage to do what you don't know is the right decision

You think it's the right decision. And then many people think it's the wrong decision. So they're

not going to like you when you make the decision. That's the point at which leaders add value

Because if you just do what people want, you're not actually adding anything. You know, they could

run the company without you. Courage is a tricky thing. You know, I think my favorite quote on this

from the great boxing trainer, Customato. He trained Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson

And he said, look, the difference between a hero and a coward isn't what they feel

They're both scared. It's what they do. You're not going to feel confident

in making a decision that you think is 52% right and everybody else thinks is wrong

but that's what you have to do to be good at this job. The thing you have to keep in mind

is you want to be liked and respected in the long run, not the short run