The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Ben Horowitz within “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” talk about the challenges to build and manage organization especially on fast paste technologies. At the beginning of the book Ben clarifies this is not recipe book and every situation needed to be dealt with differently.

Ben divide the CEOs to two groups; peace time and war time CEOs. Then he mainly focus on war time CEO's style and challenges, for one thing he believes majority of management books in the market have their content mainly on peace time CEOs or their experiences/styles during peace time. He strongly believes company need to be managed by war time CEOs during the war and behave totally differently in compare with peace time.

Horowitz illustrates his struggle on several crises he have been through and explained how he survived when the survival was against the odds. There are valuable stuff within the book ranging from what is good organization and what is bad organization, what is good manager/executive and what is bad manager/executive, value of feedback, how to layoff, how to hire and tones of other things that can come handy for entrepreneur or high level executives.

This book tell you loud and clear; be careful what you wish for if you are planning to be CEO or start your own venture. I have been through the audio book multiple times and gain a lot of insight from this book.