The writer of the book Benjamin Abraham Horowitz (born June 13, 1966) is an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz along with Marc andressen
.The importance of making tough decisions and facing hard truths head-on.
.The importance of building a strong company culture.
.The importance of being a good leader and manager
.The importance of being able to adapt to change

The summary of the hard thing about hard things

Debangsu Misra

The secret behind successful CEOs is the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. When faced with the Struggle:

. While you may not be able to share every burden, share every burden that you can. Get the maximum number of brains for the problems that your company is facing

Play long enough and you might get lucky.

 If you stay long enough in the technology business, you might get the answer that is impossible today

Everyone makes mistakes so don’t be too hard on yourself

Why CEOs should be transparent about their company’s problems:

Without communication, trust will break. As the company grows, trust becomes its biggest challenge

The more brains working on hard problems, the better. 

The company will lose if (all) employees do not work on pressing concerns

 Employees are normally aware of the issues that kill companies way before the companies go under. A good corporate culture encourages them to speak their mind

Laying people off the right way serves the interests of the company because it provides for continuity. To lay people off the right way:

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Once you have decided that you are going to lay people off, make the decision as fast as possible. This will ease the pain on both sides

Be clear in your mind about why you are laying off people. 

Don’t sugarcoat the decision for the layoff just say it plain and simple- “

Managers should fire their own people and inform them of the reasons behind the firing

The CEO needs to address the company in a message that provides context and that covers for the managers

 People want to see whether you care about firing them. Stick around and engage them

Executives are easier to dismiss because they have probably been on the other side of the conversation. But it can still be difficult. To fire an executive:

 Find the real reason why the executive needs to go. Perhaps you scaled too fast,  failed to integrate the executive, or you hired for weakness rather than for strengths. It is your job to justify why the executive is no longer needed

 Inform the board to get their approval, to preserve the reputation of the fired executive, and to get their understanding of the obviously difficult decision

 Tell the executive of the decision as quickly as possible. Script and rehearse what you need to say and don’t misspeak

 Notify others of the change in management as soon as possible

When dealing with a friend, it is important to understand that they may 

feel embarrassed and betrayed when they are demoted.

Try to dissuade them from feeling this way by being very clear in your mind why you must make the decision.

At the same time, you must decide on their best role in the company. The obvious decision is to make them work under the new boss.

When it comes to telling them of the decision, 

use appropriate language, admit the reality, and remember to acknowledge their contribution.

Take Care of the People, the Products, and the Profits In That Order

Taking care of people means making your company a good place to work. When organizations grow in size, important work can often be overlooked and hard-working employees can go unnoticed.

Happy employees deliver great products. A good place to work values employees and their contributions. They know that if they get their work done, good things will happen for them and for the company.

On the other hand, in poor workplaces, people spend most of their time 

fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. 

Their job mandates are not clear and they have no way of knowing whether they are getting their jobs done.

People are the most important asset and that’s why you need to train them. Here are some reasons why companies need to train people:

 Training increases employees’ productivity

When you train an employee for the job, they know what to expect

Training ensures product quality especially where new hires are concerned

. Employees can leave a company if they aren’t learning anything new

Why It’s Hard to Bring Big Company Execs Into Little Companies

Big company executives face two mismatches:

  Big company executives are used to things moving faster

 Running a big company requires different skills than those needed to build and run a company

To overcome these two problems, screen for mismatches during the interview process and take the integration as seriously as the interviewing process.

When hiring a new executive for your company, run a process that figures out the right match, know what you want, and make the decision alone.

Do not give employees a task that they cannot possibly perform. That is the equivalent of crippling the army. Don’t focus too much on the numbers. Other metrics such as user experience also matter.

Anything that you measure automatically sets a series of employee behaviors. So once you get the result that you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create.

 When you make short-term management decisions, there will likely be an expensive long term consequence. The three most popular types of management debts are:

 This is the equivalent of duplicating roles within the company. It creates confusion

 When you pay an employee more than they are worth, it will come back to haunt you

When there is a vacuum of feedback, there is little chance that your company will perform optimally across the board

  The head of HR needs to be a masterful process designer

 HR managers should improve relationships between employees rather than manage them

 HR needs to know everything about their industry

 HR should be in a position to advise the CEO on a number of issues

 Good HR should know when things go wrong

When a CEO agrees to a pay rise but makes it confidential, the news will likely get out and other people will demand pay rises too.

Minimizing politics can be hard because it is counter-intuitive to the goals of being open-minded and encouraging employee development.

Nonetheless, office politics can be minimized by hiring people with the right kind of ambition and by building strict processes for political issues. To minimize politics:

Create a performance and evaluation structure that will deal with compensation issues

Have opportunities for employees to expand their scope of responsibility

Be careful with gossip within the company. Have a structured way of handling complaints

Titles matter because employees want them and, eventually, people need to know who is who.

 Always complains and has an agenda rather than improving the company

Misses work for no particular reason and doesn’t take their responsibilities seriously

To help preserve key values as the company grows

Company culture makes people want to work at a particular company or not

When looking to scale your company, get a mentor or an executive who already knows how to scale. When scaling, the first 

technique to implement is specialization.

No single organizational design is perfect. There are compromises for one design over another. If you want more communication in your design, make more employees report to one manager.

In the same vein, the more people are further out in an organizational design, the less they communicate. As a CEO, it is 

fallacious to evaluate people against the future needs of the company

Managing at scale is a learned skill and not a natural ability. If you judge people in advance, it will retard their development. Give people time to grow.

What separates courage from fear is what you do and not how you feel. The coward and the courageous both fear getting hurt. They both fear failure and ridicule. 

The greatest challenge that CEOs face is 

. It helps to have people to talk to, get things out of the head and onto paper, and focus on the path ahead.

Wartime CEOs are present when the company is trying to 

 to their existence while peacetime CEOs are focused on market consolidation and expansion.

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