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The CEO must set the context within which every employee operates. The context gives meaning to the specific work that people do, aligns interests, e… - Ben Horowitz
" "The CEO must set the context within which every employee operates. The context gives meaning to the specific work that people do, aligns interests, enables decision making, and provides motivation. Well-structured goals and objectives contribute to the context, but they do not provide the whole story. More to the point, they are not the story. The story of the company goes beyond quarterly or annual goals and gets to the hard-core question of why. Why should I join this company? Why should I be excited to work here? Why should I buy its product? Why should I invest in the company? Why is the world better off as a result of this company’s existence? When a company clearly articulates its story, the context for everyone — employees, partners, customers, investors, and the press — becomes clear.
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About Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz (born June 13, 1966) is an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author.
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Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
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Additional quotes by Ben Horowitz
I made the transition from a peacetime CEO to a wartime CEO. By virtue of my position and the fact that we were a public company, nobody besides me had the complete picture. I knew we were in deep, deep trouble. Nobody besides me could get us out of the trouble, and I was through listening to advice about what we should do from people who did not understand all the pieces. I wanted all the data and information I could get, but I didn’t need any recommendations about the future direction of the company. This was wartime. The company would live or die by the quality of my decisions, and there was no way to hedge or soften the responsibility. If everybody I had hired — and who gave their lives to the company — could be sent home with little to show for it, then there were no excuses that would help. There would be no: “It was a horrible economic environment”; “I got bad advice”; “Things changed so quickly.” The only choices were survival or total destruction. Yes, most things could still be delegated and most managers would be empowered to make decisions in their areas of expertise, but the fundamental question of whether — and how — Loudcloud could survive was mine and mine alone to answer.
3. A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast; good news travels slow. If you investigate companies that have failed, you will find that many employees knew about the fatal issues long before those issues killed the company. If the employees knew about the deadly problems, why didn’t they say something? Too often the answer is that the company culture discouraged the spread of bad news, so the knowledge lay dormant until it was too late to act.
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GOOD PRODUCT MANAGER/BAD PRODUCT MANAGER Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence. A good product manager is the CEO of the product. Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product. They are responsible for right product/right time and all that entails. A good product manager knows the context going in (the company, our revenue funding, competition, etc.), and they take responsibility for devising and executing a winning plan (no
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