Parcells: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?” Davis: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your … - Ben Horowitz

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Parcells: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?” Davis: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.” That might be the best CEO advice ever. Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The media don’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, and even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares. And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy. All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

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About Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz (born June 13, 1966) is an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
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Shorter versions of this quote

Parcells: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?” Davis: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.” That might be the best CEO advice ever. Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The media don’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, and even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.

Additional quotes by Ben Horowitz

This means that you will face a broad set of things that you don’t know how to do that require skills you don’t have. Nevertheless, everybody will expect you to know how to do them, because, well, you are the CEO. I remember when I first became CEO, an investor asked me to send him the “cap table.” I had a vague idea of what he meant, but I didn’t actually know what the format was supposed to look like or what should be included or excluded. It was a silly little thing and I had much bigger things to worry about, but everything is hard when you don’t actually know what you are doing. I wasted quite a bit of time sweating over that stupid spreadsheet.

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Generally, people who think one-on-one meetings are a bad idea have been victims of poorly designed ones. The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas, and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email, and other less personal and intimate mechanisms

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