The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Hardcover – March 4, 2014

If you want to know why The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers is worth buying, here’s the money quote.

“Almost all management books focus on how to do things correctly, so you don’t screw up, these lessons provide insight into what you must do after you have screwed up.”

If you’re planning to start a company, whether it’s a high-tech company or the kinds of companies that I started and ran, read this book. If you’re going to be someone in charge of anything in any kind of a company, read this book.

If all you want are the big ideas, or Horowitz’ philosophy, you can get them from his blog and articles. You don’t need to buy this book. But if you want a handy advisor for that 3 AM moment when you’re thinking about firing someone you like, buy the book. Keep it handy. I’ve had those moments and I wish I’d had it.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things has a whole lot of information packed inside it. You can read it from cover to cover and get a lot of value. Or, you can think of it as a series of conversations with bosses and mentors. Horowitz had a lot of those. And his mentors included people like Andy Grove and Jim Barksdale.

The wisdom that he shares and credits to them, reminds me of the wisdom that I received from bosses and mentors and which I later shared with protégés. It’s real, it’s practical, and it will help. I think that the discussion of things like firing and laying people off are more than worth the price of the book by themselves. And they’re only a small part of what’s in The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Here are a few quotes from the book to give you an idea of what you’re in for. You don’t have to be a CEO to use what’s here, even though Horowitz aims the book at CEOs. Substitute “leader” for “CEO” in most quotes and use the wisdom.

Quotes from The Hard Thing About Hard Things

“That’s the hard thing about hard things— there is no formula for dealing with them.”

“People always ask me, ‘What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?’ Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.”

“Don’t take it personally. The predicament that you are in is probably all your fault. You hired the people. You made the decisions. But you knew the job was dangerous when you took it. Everybody makes mistakes. Every CEO makes thousands of mistakes. Evaluating yourself and giving yourself an F doesn’t help.”

“One of the most important management lessons for a founder/ CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.”

“Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers— it’s strictly for amateurs.”

“The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad.”

“Embrace the struggle.”

There are plenty more in The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers.

Far better than the average business / mgmt book, where most of the time I'm reading things I've heard before. Not here. Highly recommended for anyone trying to start, build, grow, sustain, save, or transfer a business at the CEO level. There are many excellent business ideas and experiences here that, I'll bet, you've never considered. If I taught an MBA course on the CEO suite, this would be among the required reading.

The most memorable part of the book to me was the notion that there are no silver bullets to solve problems, just good old fashioned lead bullets. good lesson to learn, and a mistake I see a lot of young start-up companies make. Of course this is my oversimplified version of the concept which Mr. Horowitz does a far better job of explaining. Worth reading just to see what he has to say about this concept.

Must read even if you just consider to be involved in any startup activity. Will help you to understand what you are about to signup. :)
I saw some who dismiss the book because it does not cause respect to the author. Well, the truth is hard. And I respect Ben even more with naked truth about himself.
A book is a collection of extreme stories, ugly problems and ugly solutions, that allowed company to go forward.

If you ask Ben (of Andreessen Horowitz) how well he slept when he was CEO of his company, he’d say: “I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.” You get the point: running a company is hard. Very hard. This book gives a realistic view of the ups and downs of startups. It will teach you why hiring great product managers is essential, how to train and develop people and how to build a sustainable culture (hint: it has nothing to do with paid lunches, yoga classes or pilates at work). This book will make you feel normal again. I read it 3 times, last year alone.

This book is fire. It's not about how to do things write. It's about what to do when things go wrong. And of course, in the words of Horowitz himself, "things always go wrong". I think my favorite takeaway from the book is when Horowitz talks about The Struggle. The Struggle on the path to greatness that every entrepreneur encounters. The quote from the book that echoes through my head again and again is: "The Struggle is not failure. But it can cause failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak." Horowitz wastes no time being very upfront about what it takes to win in a competitive entrepreneurial environment.

I highly recommend this book.

Great book. In the VC biz and ready a number but really find this distinguishing;y insightful...from the ops side to the deal side without self aggrandizing embellishment. If fact, Horowitz has a straight forward style that, if anything, is self deprecating. definitely a great read whether you're an entrepreneur, want to be one or want to read an quasi memoire.

Excellent read, and Horowitz' credentials allow him to be very direct at times. His experience gives his advice a lot of weight.

There is a very real battle for the heart and mind of management science. The classical old guard (let's call it the Jack Welch school) stands in one corner, and the progressive Millennial-friendly vanguard (Gary Hamel school) stands in the other.

Horowitz squares this by his notion of peacetime vs wartime CEO. He comes clean by saying he's been primarily a wartime CEO, and his advice while level-headed is much more biased towards the wartime CEO.

I think he's right, and different times require different comportment. However, the millennials are hungry and desperate, and the management literature is far too anemic when it comes to how this management style should look like.

For MBA fresh grads reading this: please proceed with caution. It is never OK to yell at anyone and by all means it is not recommended to use profanity just because the company is under stress.