The Hard Thing About Hard Things

If you have not seen the recommendation by Brad Feld and Fred Wilson to get the book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” by Ben Horowitz. Here are some excerpts that should motivate you to read the book. I have referred to Ben’s blog a number of times in my blog posts. I think Ben writes from his heart and it shows. I am about halfway through the book and I have to say I am hooked and I keep thinking about the book despite all the other things that I doing.

I have to say the best chapter in the book so far has been Chapter 5 – Take Care of the People, the products, and the profits – in that order. This chapter really resonated with me as I have been given feedback that I spend too much time taking care of the people, it was great to get some validation for my beliefs. There is a reason why I write a lot more about Leadership and Team Development in this blog because I feel we seem to have forgotten that a Company or a Startup or a Service is nothing but a collection of people and if the empathy, their dreams, trust, relationship and love is lost between the team member all other things fail. Here is an excerpt from the book

My old boss Jim Barksdale was fond of saying, “We take care of the people, the products, and the profits – in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work. Most workplaces are far from good. As organizations grow large, important work go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and bureaucratic processes can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy.

When everything went wrong from the dot-com crash to NASDAQ threatening to delist the company, the thing that saved us were the techniques developed in this chapter. If your company is a good place to work, you too may live long enough to find your glory.

Are you intrigued to read the rest of the chapter? I was and I am reading it as I type this. Go and get the book! it would be the best thing you did.

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