1: “Remember, Ben, things are always darkest before they go completely black,” said Netscape founder Marc Andreessen to his business partner and then Loudcloud CEO Ben Horowitz.
“He was joking, but as we entered our first quarter as a public company, those words seemed prescient,” Ben writes in his wonderful book The Hard Thing About Hard Things about being a Wartime CEO. The year was 2001. It was … continue reading
1: It was the middle of the dot-com implosion in 2001. Loudcloud CEO Ben Horowitz sat in his office, arms folded.
Across from him sat two colleagues, both of whom had graduated from Stanford Business School.
They presented forty-five slides about why Ben’s decision to start a software division was “quixotic, misguided, and downright stupid,” he writes in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
“They argued that … continue reading
1: “Should Yahoo bring back Koogle?”
Felicia Horowitz smiled at her husband, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz.
“Huh?”
It was 2012, and Yahoo had just fired its CEO, Scott Thompson.
“Tim Koogle? How do you even know who Tim Koogle is?” he writes in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Felicia then recalled a conversation they had shared eleven years earlier, back in 2001.… continue reading
1: “Imagine we’re floating in a clear blue ocean—somewhere warm like Hawaii or Mexico,” Ron Shaich writes in his terrific book Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations.
“Waves are breaking and rolling toward the white, sandy beach,” Ron notes. “We know that’s where we are headed, so our ultimate destination is clear. And we know that any wave will take you to shore.
“But not just … continue reading
It was September 2022. Eliud Kipchoge set a new all-time world record for the marathon in Berlin.
“What many people do not know about one of the fastest marathoners in history is his habit of keeping a detailed diary,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.
“This diary is not just a log of his physical training,” Anne-Laure notes, “it also … continue reading
1: Psychologist John Gottman can predict who will eventually get divorced a stunning 94 percent of the time.
In a pioneering 1992 study, John and his team interviewed fifty-two married couples.
They asked each couple “a variety of questions about how they met, why they decided to get married, and what changes their relationships had been through and observed them as they took part in a fifteen-minute discussion about a … continue reading
1: It was the early 1970s, and cognitive psychologist Virginia Valian was stuck.
She “found herself so paralyzed by work anxiety that she couldn’t write a word of her PhD thesis,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
Our lives can be shaped by what it is we are trying to avoid, Oliver observes. “We talk about … continue reading
1: Gay Hendricks had just delivered his first speech to a professional audience.
A man approached the podium and said, “I really enjoyed your talk. It wasn’t so much what you said but the way you said it,” Gay writes in his book The Genius Zone.
Gay had always been nervous about public speaking, so the compliment lit him up. “What did you like about the way I spoke?” … continue reading
1: “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters – one represents danger and one represents opportunity,” John F. Kennedy once said.
Yesterday, we explored how the best CEOs create a small team of senior leaders to deal directly with the crisis. This prevents the CEO from becoming all-consumed by the situation and enables the rest of the organization to continue to get work done. … continue reading
1: Imagine being the captain of a battleship. A torpedo has hit the ship.
Now what?
“Send a portion of their crew to contain the hull breach,” Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra write in their book CEO Excellence.
The captain, however, “stays on the bridge, increases speed to full, and deploys the rest of the crew to keep fighting the war.”
The best CEOs take … continue reading
