A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A comp… - Ben Horowitz

A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved.

A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them.

Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.” Michael had a way of making things extremely clear. We thanked him and headed to the airport. We called both EDS and IBM to let them know that we would complete the process over the next eight weeks and sell the Loudcloud business to someone. If they wanted to play, they had to move on that schedule or withdraw immediately. The Michael Ovitz artificial deadline was in full effect.

In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.

It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.