Horowitz: The Hard Thing About The Hard Things

Taivas + Helvetti on Suomessa luonut omanlaisensa ilmiön yrittäjyyskirjallisuudessa. Harvoin lienee yrittäjyydestä kertovaa kirjaa luettua niin laajasti kuin kyseistä teosta. Ben Horowitzin The Hard Thing About The Hard Things on vähän vastaavanlainen merkkiteos USA:ssa. Sen tavoitteena on samalla tavalla avata yrittäjyyttä uudesta näkökulmasta. Siinä se onnistuu kiitettävästi. Siispä jokaisen Taivas + Helvetti opuksen opiskelleen kannattaa jatkaa perehtymistään tällä teoksella.

 

Ben Horowitz: The Hard Thing About The Hard Things

Ben Horowitz tietää mistä puhuu. Sen verran vakuuttava track record hänellä on menestyvien yritysten rakentajana, ensin itse yrittäjänä ja sen jälkeen uraauurtavana pääomasijoittajana Andreessen Horowitz yhtiössään yhdessä Marc Andreessenin kanssa. Jos Andreessen Horowitz eli tutummin a16z ei ole entuudestaan tuttu niin suosittelen tutustumaan: menestyksekäs ja innovatiivinen pääomasijoitusyhtiö, joka on noussut alansa arvostetuimpien ja seuratuimpien joukkoon varsin lyhyellä historialla. Huippuaktiivisia verkossa eli Twitterissä, blogeissa ja muissa verkostoissa jakamassa näkemyksiään.

 

The Hard Thing About The Hard Things on osuva nimi. Horowitz pystyy käytännönläheisesti ja uskottavasti osoittamaan, kuinka yrittäjyys on enimmäkseen vaikeiden asioiden ratkaisemista. Hänenkin huippuyrityksensä ovat olleet kuoleman kielissä vain hetkiä ennen jättimenestystä. Tämän kirja avaa todellisin esimerkein.

 

Tätä kirjaa lukiessa arvostus yrittäjyyttä ja johtajuutta kohtaan kasvaa entisestään. Kirja ei pyri opettamaan, vaan enemmänkin jakamaan kokemuksia. Tämä on hyvä lähestymistapa, koska useisiin tilanteisiin ei ole oikeaa tai oppikirjamaista ratkaisua olemassakaan. Silti on tehtävä ratkaisuja. Kirja on myös varsin henkilökohtainen ja ihmisläheinen eli persoonallisuuksiin kiinnitetään huomiota ja ymmärretään, että yrityselämässä tavoitteet saavutetaan ihmisten kanssa ja kautta.  

 

Erinomainen kirja luettavaksi laajalle kohderyhmälle. Yrittäjille, startup yrittäjille, yrittäjiksi aikoville, toimitusjohtajille ja sellaisiksi toivoville, pääomasijoittajille ja toki myös kaikille muille yrittäjien kanssa työtä tekeville (pankit, virkamiehet jne) tämä on silmiä aukaisevaa luettavaa. Suosittelen. Minä noteeraan tämän parhaimpien lukemieni kirjojen joukkoon.

 

Parhaita sitaatteja

 

• "Flowers are cheaper than divorce." - Ben Horowitz's father
• One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occured on the day when I stopped being too positive. (64)
• Build a culture that rewards - not punishes - people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved. ..."Don't bring me a problem without bringing me a solution", management truisms like these may be good for employees to aspire to in the abstract, but they can also be the enemy of free-flowing information - which may be critical for health of the company. (67)
• The wrong way to view an executive firing is as an executive failure; the correct way to view an executive firing is as an interview/integration failure. Therefore, the first step to properly firing an executive is figuring out why you hired the wrong person for your company. (74)
• 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. (92)
• We take care of the people, the products, and the profits - in that order. It's a simple saying, but it's deep. (98)
• The most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company is very different from the job of a small company executive. (120)
• Look for candidates who come in with more new initiatives than you think are possible. This is a good sign. (122)
• The more experience you have, the more you realize that there is something seriously wrong with every employee in your company )including you). Nobody is perfect. The very best way to know what you want is to act in the role. Not just in title, but in real action. (126)
• People rarely improve weakness they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance. (137)
• A high-quality human resource organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done. (138)
• Perhaps the CEO's most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company. The architecture might include the organizational design, meetings, processes, email, yammer, and even one-on-one meetings with managers and employees. Absent a well-designed communication architecture, information and ideas will stagnate, and your company will degenerate into a bad Place to work. (176)
• If you don't think entrepreneurs are more important than venture capitalists, we can't use you at Andreessen Horowitz. (182)
• If you want to build an important company, then at some point you have to scale. People in startup land often talk about the magic of how few people built the original Google or the original Facebook, but today Google employs twenty thousand people and today's Facebook employs more than fifteen hundred people. So, if you want to do something that matters, then you are going to have to learn the black art of scaling a human organization. (185)
• Specifically, the following things that cause no trouble when you are small become big challenges as you grow: Communication, Common knowledge, Decision making. (186)
• The first rule or organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad. With any design, you will optimize communication among some parts of the organization at the expense of other parts. (188)
• The purpose of process is communication. ...When communication in an organization spans across organizational boundaries, processes will help ensure that the communication happens and that it happens with quality. (190)
• By far the most difficult skill I learned as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. (201)
• 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 you don't know how to do that require skills you don't have. Nevertheless, everybody will expect you to know how to do them, because, well, you are the CEO. (202)
• Ideally, the CEO will be urgent yet not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally culpable. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself. (204)
• If you don't like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don't become CEO. (206)
• When my partners and I meet with entrepreneurs, the two key characteristics that we look for are brilliance and courage. (209)
• The primary purpose of the organizational hierarchy in a company is decision-making efficiency. (216)
• What makes people want to follow a leader? We look for three key traits: 1) The ability to articulate the vision, 2) The right kind of ambition, 3) The ability to achieve the vision. (219)
• The enemy of competence is sometimes confidence. (223)
• A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy. (237)
• Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions. Great decisions come from CEOs who display an elite mixture of intelligence, logic, and courage. (237)
• Ensuring the quality of the team is a core part of running the company. Great CEO's constantly assess whether they are building the best team. (240)