1: How do you personally respond when adversity strikes?

Do you see adversity as a challenge you can meet, or as a threat that could overwhelm you?

Your perspective on adversity significantly impacts your life.

Good news: There’s a proven way to shift from threat to challenge. Read on to learn how.

“In a threat mindset, you focus on the potential for risk, danger, harm, or loss,” Jane McGonigal writes … continue reading

1: “There’s wind and then there’s a typhoon, there are waves and then there’s a tsunami,” Andy Grove writes in Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

The same is true in business.

“There are competitive forces and then there are supercompetitive forces,” he notes.

Andy calls it a “10X” change.

2: Harvard Professor Michael Porter identified the various forces that determine … continue reading

1: Intel president Andy Grove was nervous.

It was 1986. Andy had flown to Oregon to address Intel’s best developers, recognizing that the company stood at a crossroads, he writes in his book Only the Paranoid Survive.

Since the company’s inception, memory chips had been the company’s core business.

But now the company was exiting the memory chip business because Japanese competitors had entered the market with higher quality … continue reading

1: “We had lost our bearings. We were wandering in the valley of death,” Andy Grove writes in his book Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

The year was 1984, a pivotal moment for Intel.

The company had been founded 16 years earlier.  “Every start-up has some kind of a core idea,” Andy notes.

“Ours was simple. Semiconductor technology had … continue reading

1: In the middle of the dot-com crash, against all odds, Ben Horowitz had succeeded in finding a buyer for Loudcloud, the cloud computing company he had founded.

EDS agreed to acquire the firm for $63.5 million in cash, along with the associated liabilities and cash burn.

Not only that, “we would retain the intellectual property, Opsware, and become a software company,” Ben writes.

“EDS would then license … continue reading

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: “Why does everybody hate Ben so much?”

That was the question asked by Loudcloud CEO Ben Horowitz‘s mother-in-law.

Ben called an all-company meeting, which his wife Felicia typically attended.

“This time her parents were in town, so they came, too,” Ben writes in The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

It was the year 2000, and Ben was in a difficult spot.

A year earlier, his start-up, Loudcloud, … 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