The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Hard Thing About Hard Things is an inside look at the tough decisions and lonely times all CEOs face, before showing you what it takes to build a great organization and become a world-class leader.

Have you ever worked in a place where there was a lot of gossip? If so, it might have been due to a cover-up policy. A lot of companies try to cover up crises or when things go wrong, in order to solve them quietly while the employees think everything is great.

This is a sucker’s move for 2 reasons:

Information about a crisis always leaks through, so eventually, your employees will find out anyway. By trying to solve the problem alone and in secrecy, you’re not allocating the resources to it that it deserves and needs.

Imagine you’re being sued for a technical malfunction of your product.

You could try to hire a great lawyer, go to court and fend off the charges. However, eventually someone will spill the beans about your trip to the courtroom, causing all of your employees to panic about the sudden news and wonder if they’ll get fired.

Instead, what if you were the first one to divulge the bad news, and do so as soon as possible? You could rally everyone together and just honestly say you’re in trouble.

This will not only ease the burden on your own shoulders as CEO, it’ll also help get the problem in the hands of the people that are most capable of solving it.

Now an engineer can look at what went wrong and if it was an actual product malfunction or just operated in the wrong way.

Don’t think your employees can’t handle the truth. Be honest and upfront about bad news, and your entire company will benefit from it.

Good ones, and bad ones. Joke! Horowitz makes 2 interesting distinctions, he calls them Ones and Twos. This is in no means an order. Ones are the strategic CEOs, the visionaries, those who are great at finding a path the company can follow. They love making strategic decisions and aren’t afraid to pivot the company when it needs to. A good example of a One is Bill Gates. Twos prefer execution and managing over researching and trying to make decisions. They’re the practical CEOs, who love to implement, direct a team and get stuff done. For a company to truly shine, you need to have enough of both qualities, so if you’re a One, get some Two skills and vice versa. Horowitz calls these functional Ones, which are important to have as executives as well. For example, if your marketing director is a functional One, she’ll be cool with…