Sometimes the answer lies in doing what is necessary, not what is easy.
Ben Horowitz first published his book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” about ten years ago. Yet most of his content couldn’t be more relevant today. Starting with his personal background and upbringing in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, the book quickly gets into the nitty-gritty of his experience running Netscape and Loudcloud, which would later morph into Opsware. That’s where the book lives. Most leadership advice throughout this book are distilled lessons from his experience at these three companies.
When reading past the first three chapters, the reader will come to an imminent refreshing realization: the author’s notion that “there are no easy answers” is the answer to great leadership. A great leader of a business lives with the relentless struggle between deciding a bad and a terrible situation. Moreover, a great leader recognizes the adversity to utilize its downward energy and turn it into something productive. In essence, it is a book on functional business leadership. How to function as a leader when your business is faced with layoffs, raising capital, restructuring, hiring the right people, promoting the right people, and many more real-life business scenarios.
I like the rather simple structure of medium to short-length chapters that describe a situation infused with his hindsight knowledge. It’s to the point, crisp, and without fuzzing around the reality of the situation, which is often a choice between terrible and horrific, but a choice that has to be taken nevertheless. Understanding that the leader of the company is ultimately alone in making those hard decisions with imperfect information at a fast pace is a baseline for great leadership. There is obviously so much more to unpack here. Read it for yourself. You can buy the book on Amazon.
My only quibble with the book was including quoted rap lyrics in almost every chapter. It created distractions to my reading flow when my brain was trying to think through for example his account of selling Opsware to HP, but the chapter opens with Kanye West’s lyrics to “Stronger” and its catchy tune immediately infiltrated my thought process.
I would recommend this book to business owners who are ambitious and whose businesses are already employing double-digit staff. It’s a fun read when you run a small sub-10 employees startup, but not really applicable just yet. It’s also a great book to keep on your desk and randomly pick up for guidance on a certain situation. My main takeaway is likely found in the chapter on the most difficult CEO skill to master and it is very simple: don’t quit.