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

Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle.

But do you know what’s expensive?” he asked. Again, I replied, “No, what?” He said, “

IF I’M DOING A GOOD JOB, WHY DO I FEEL SO BAD?

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust. Consider the following: If I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions whatsoever, because I know that whatever you are doing is in my best interests. On the other hand, if I don’t trust you at a

Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

What do I mean by politics? I mean people advancing their careers or agendas by means other than merit and contribution.

Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while.

But, what about being loyal to the team that got you here? If your current executive team helped you grow your company tenfold, how can you dismiss them when they fall behind in running the behemoth they created? The answer is that your loyalty must go to your employees—the people who report to your executives. Your engineers, marketing people, sal

The first problem is that everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO. No training as a manager, general manager, or in any other job actually prepares you to run a company. The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company. This means that you will face a broad set of things that you don’t know how to do that require skills yo

IMPLEMENTING YOUR TRAINING PROGRAM