So What Makes People Want To Follow A Leader?

• Force them to create. Give them monthly, weekly, and even daily objectives to make sure that they produce immediately.
• Every executive must understand the product, the technology, the customers, and the market.
• Require them to bring a comprehensive set of questions about ever...

• FIRST RULE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP: THERE ARE NO RULES
• FEEDBACK IS A DIALOGUE, NOT A MONOLOGUE
• If you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO.
• People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.
• Be careful with “he said,...

For example, if Jasper is the worst vice president in the company, then all of the directors will benchmark themselves against Jasper and demand promotions as soon as they reach his low level of competency.

Solution:

1. To begin, start with an extremely crisp definition not only of ...

Two key techniques to be useful in minimizing politics.

1. Hire people with the right kind of ambition.(What's right kind of ambition? Read next idea👇)
2. Build strict processes for potentially political issues and do not deviate.

Certain activities attract political beh...

• Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is.
• Horowitz’s single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when he stopped being too positive.
• An early lesson Ben learned was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it alway...

Andy Grove said that : Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform.

Two primary reasons why people quit:

1. They hated their manager; generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were...

• During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, the manager should do 10 percent of the talking and 90 percent of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.
• While it’s not the manager’s job to set the agenda or do the talking, the manag...

• Training starts with a golden rule: Managers must lay off their own people. They cannot pass the task to HR or to a more sadistic peer.
• Be present. Be visible. Be engaging. People want to see you. They want to see whether you care.
• Talk to people. Help them carry their things...

A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy. Want to see a great company story? Read Jeff Bezos’s three-page letter he wrote to shareholders in 1997. In telling Amazon’s story ...

• Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product. Bad product managers have lots of excuses.
• Good product managers define their job and their success. Bad product managers constantly want to be told what to do.
• Good ...

• The basic idea is that people open up to feedback far more if you start by complimenting them (slice of bread number one), then you give them the difficult message (the shit), then wrap up by reminding them how much you value their strengths (slice of bread number two).
• You don’t mak...

The early days of Facebook, Zuckerberg deployed a shocking motto: Move fast and break things.

Meaning: If you move fast and innovate, you will break things.

The following things that cause no trouble when you are small become big challenges as you grow:

1. Com...

1. Trust. Without trust, communication breaks. More specifically: In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

2. The more brains working on the hard problems, the better.

3. A good culture is like the old RIP routing ...

• The Peter Principle is a concept in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate’s performance in their current role, rather than on abilities related to the intended role. Thus, “managers rise to the level of their incompetence.”
• The Law of Crappy Peop...

• The first step to properly firing an executive is figuring out why you hired the wrong person for your company.
• There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself, “If our com...

• Focus on the output first. What should the process produce? In the case of the interview process, an outstanding employee. If that’s the goal, what’s the process to get there?
• Two core skills for running an organization: First, knowing what to do. Second, getting the company to do wh...

• There is one skill that stands out as CEO is the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.
• First principle of the Bushido—the way of the warrior: keep death in mind at all times. If a warrior keeps death in mind at all times and lives as though each day m...

• In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. These things make their jobs both motivating and fulfilling.
• In a poor organization, people spend much of thei...

Parcells: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?”

Davis: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.” That might be the best CEO advice ever.

• TAKE CARE OF THE PEOPLE, THE PRODUCTS, AND THE PROFITS—IN THAT ORDE...

• Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move.
• Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the tech...

Very early on, Jeff Bezos envisioned a company that made money by delivering value to rather than extracting value from its customers. In order to do that, he wanted to be both the price leader and customer service leader. You can’t do that if you waste a lot of money. He decided to build frugali...

When someone learns to drive a race car, one of the first lessons taught is that when you are going around a curve at 200 mph, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company...

The judgment that you have to make is,

(a) Is this market really much bigger (more than an order of magnitude) than has been exploited to date? and

(b) Are we going to be number one?

If the answer to either (a) or (b) is no, then you should consider selling.

If the answers...

• Peacetime in business means those times when a company has a large advantage over the competition in its core market, and its market is growing. In times of peace, the company can focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths.
• In wartime, a company is fending ...

• As defined by Andy Grove, the right kind of ambition is ambition for the company’s success with the executive’s own success only coming as a by-product of the company’s victory.
• The wrong kind of ambition is ambition for the executive’s personal success regardless of the company’s o...