Promoting From Within
My partner Scott Weiss just wrote a blog post about promoting from within. You can read it here.
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archive // Management
Demoting A Loyal Friend
When I started Loudcloud, I hired the best people that I knew—people whom I respected, trusted and liked. Like me, many of them did not have deep experience in the jobs that I gave them, but they worked night and day to make it work and they made great contributions to the company. Yet for…
More »Lies that Losers Tell
When a company starts to lose its major battles, the truth often becomes the first casualty. CEOs and employees work tirelessly to develop creative narratives that help them avoid dealing with the obvious facts. Despite their intense creativity, many companies often end up with the exact same false explanations. Some familiar lies “She left, but…
More »The Freaky Friday Management Technique
Many years ago, I encountered a particularly tricky management situation. Two excellent organizations in the company, Customer Support and Sales Engineering, went to war with each other. The Sales Engineers escalated a series of blistering complaints arguing that the Customer Support team did not respond with urgency, refused to fix issues in the product, and…
More »Management Debt
Thanks to Ward Cunningham, the metaphor technical debt is now a well-understood concept. While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will eventually have to pay it back—with interest. Often this trade-off makes sense, but you will run into serious trouble if you fail to keep the trade-off…
More »Management Quality Assurance
Everyone in the technology industry seems to agree that people are paramount, yet nobody seems to be on the same page with what the people organization—Human Resources—should look like. The problem is that when it comes to HR, most CEOs don’t really know what they want. In theory, they want a well-managed company with a…
More »Preparing To Fire an Executive
When you recruit an executive, you paint a beautiful picture of her future in your company. You describe in great depth and color how awesome it will be for her to accept your offer and how much better it will be for her than joining that other company. Then one day you realize you must…
More »The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage
I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got…
More »When Employees Misinterpret Managers
When I ran Opsware, we had the non-linear quarter problem also known affectionately as the hockey stick. The hockey stick refers to the shape of the revenue graph over the course of a quarter. Our hockey stick was so bad that one quarter, we booked 90% of our new bookings on the last day of…
More »The CEO’s CEO
Great chefs find things in the style, presentation and technique used in a meal that the ordinary diner never sees. Great musicians hear things that casual listeners completely miss. CEOs evaluate other CEOs much differently than the popular press or the general population. In mainstream thinking, the absolute success of the company determines the CEO’s…
More »Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO
TOM HAGEN Mike, why am I out? MICHAEL CORLEONE You’re not a wartime consigliere. Things may get tough with the move we’re trying. —Scene from The Godfather Recently, Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO of Google and founder Larry Page took over. Much of the news coverage focused on Page’s ability to be the “face…
More »What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology
By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same…
More »Titles and Promotions
Often when I meet with startups, the employees have no job titles. This makes sense, because everybody is just working to build the company. Roles needn’t be clearly defined and, in fact, can’t be, because everyone does a little bit of everything. In an environment like this there are no politics and nobody is jockeying…
More »Is it OK to Hire People from Your Friend’s Company?
Every good technology company needs great people. The best companies invest time, money, and sweat equity into becoming world-class recruiting machines. But how far should you take your quest to build the world’s greatest team? Is it fair game to hire employees from your friend’s company? Will you still be friends? First, what do I…
More »When Smart People are Bad Employees
In hi-tech, intelligence is always a critical element in any employee, because what we do is difficult and complex and the competitors are filled with extremely smart people. However, intelligence is not the only important quality. Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team.…
More »Ones and Twos
In Jim Collins’ best selling management book Good to Great, he demonstrates through massive research and comprehensive analysis that when it comes to CEO succession, internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates. The core reason is knowledge. As I discussed in Why We Prefer Founding CEOs, knowledge of technology, prior decisions, culture, personnel, et al tend…
More »Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good?
The biggest difference between being a great functional manager and being a great general manager—and particularly a great CEO—is that as a general manager, you must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs. In fact, often you will have to hire and manage…
More »The Right Way to Lay People Off
Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard, I had a conversation with the legendary venture capitalist Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital. He wanted to hear the story of how we went from doomed in the eyes of the world to a $1.6B outcome with no recapitalization. After I took him through the details including several…
More »The Right Kind of Ambition
Stay in your place While I sit here and rule I’m king of a cow And I’m king of a mule —Yertle the Turtle In my last post, I mentioned that you should strive to hire people with the right kind of ambition. Surprisingly to me, I received a large number of responses from readers…
More »How to Minimize Politics in Your Company
In all my years in business, I have yet to hear someone say: “I love corporate politics.” On the other hand, I meet plenty of people who complain bitterly about corporate politics—sometimes even in the companies they run. So, if nobody loves politics, why all the politics? Political behavior almost always starts with the CEO.…
More »Taking the Mystery out of Scaling a Company
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’s Google employs 20,000 people and today’s Facebook employs over 1,500 people. So, if you want to…
More »CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is
My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive. As a young CEO, I felt the pressure—the pressure of employees depending on me, the pressure of not really knowing what I was doing, the pressure of being responsible for tens of millions of dollars of other people’s…
More »How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs
No position in a company is more important than the CEO and, as a result, no job gets more scrutiny. Sadly, little of this analysis benefits CEOs as most of the discussions happen behind their backs. This post is a step in the opposite direction. By describing how Andreessen Horowitz evaluates CEOs, I am at the same time describing what I…
More »Why Startups Should Train Their People
Most managers seem to feel that training employees is a job that should be left to others. I, on the other hand, strongly believe that the manager should do it himself. —Andy Grove, High Output Management When I first became a manager, I had mixed feelings about training. Logically, training for hi-tech companies made sense,…
More »The Scale Anticipation Fallacy
The other day I was talking to a couple of friends of mine, one a VC and the other a CEO. During the meeting, we were discussing one of the executives at the CEO’s company. The executive in question performs exceptionally, but lacks experience managing at larger scale. My friend the VC innocently advised the…
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