even if we laid off 100 percent of the employees, the infrastructure costs would still kill us without a sharper sales ramp. - Ben Horowitz

In a company context, this is a critical point. As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust. A CEO’s ability to build this trust over time is often the difference between companies that execute well and companies that are chaotic.

أحد دروس الإدارة الأهمِّ للمؤسِّس/المدير التنفيذيِّ هو عدم الاعتماد كلِّيًّا على الحَدْس. إنَّ أعظم تحسينٍ شخصيٍّ حدث لي بوصفي مديرًا تنفيذيًّا، كان في اليوم الذي توقَّفتُ فيه عن كوني إيجابيًّا جدًّا.

When you run a large organization, you tend to become very good at tasks such as complex decision-making, prioritization, organizational design, process improvement, and organizational communication. When you are building an organization, there is no organization to design, there are no processes to improve, and communicating with the organization is simple. On the other hand, you have to be very adept at running a high-quality hiring process, have terrific domain expertise (you are personally responsible for quality control), know how to create process from scratch, and be extremely creative about initiating new directions and tasks.