The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Part #2

Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Continued from Part #1

Credit to Author

The Three P’s Jim Barksdale, Horowitz’s old boss at Netscape, once said, “We take care of the people, the product and the profits — in that order.” If people like working for your company and you look out for them, they will reward you with loyalty and hard work. If you don’t take care of your people, the product and the profits won’t matter.

Taking care of people means training them well and having managers regularly meet one-on-one with their direct reports. It also means avoiding “management debt.” That accumulates when you make a short-term management move that has costly, long-term consequences. Examples would be overcompensating an employee who has a competing job offer or putting two people in the same job because you want to keep both in the company. The best CEOs avoid acquiring management debt. Faced with cutting a popular project that’s not in the company’s long-term plans or keeping it for morale purposes, they’ll cut it every time. They make hard decisions that “ruffle the feathers.”

“Even with all the advice and hindsight in the world, hard things will continue to be hard things.”