The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

Asking yourself, “Do I value internal or external knowledge more for this position?” will help you determine whether to go for experience or youth.

Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.

The product management team had an allergic reaction to prioritizing potentially good features above features that might hypothetically beat BladeLogic. They would say, “How can we walk away from requirements that we know to be true to pursue something that we think will help?”

As CEO, there is never enough time to gather all information needed to make a decision. You must make hundreds of decisions big and small in the course of a typical week. You cannot simply stop all other activities to gather comprehensive data and do exhaustive analysis to make that single decision. Knowing this, you must continuously and systemati

Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a varie

THE FINE LINE BETWEEN FEAR…

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DON’T PUNK OUT AND DON…

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Once you’ve mastered the keys, you should practice what you’ve mastered all the time. As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything. You should have an opinion on every forecast, every product plan, every presentation, and even every comment. Let people know what you think. If you like someone’s comment, give her the feedback. If you

THE…

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