If you run a company, you will experience overwhelming psychological pressure to be overly positive. Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and te… - Ben Horowitz

Every really good, really experienced CEO I know shares one important characteristic: They tend to opt for the hard answer to organizational issues. If faced with giving everyone the same bonus to make things easy or with sharply rewarding performance and ruffling many feathers, they’ll ruffle the feathers.

If you want people to treat every corporate nickel like it’s their own, then having them stay at the Red Roof Inn sends a better cultural signal than having them stay at the Four Seasons — but if you want them to have the confidence to ask for a $5 million order, the opposite might be true. If you don’t know what you want, there is no chance that you will get it.

What do I mean by politics? I mean people advancing their careers or agendas by means other than merit and contribution. There may be other types of politics, but politics of this form seem to be the ones that really bother people.