leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity. - Ben Horowitz

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime

The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad.

courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study. As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right. The most difficult decisions (and often the most important) are difficult precisely because they will be deeply unpopular with the CEO’s most important constituencies (employees, investors, and customers).