If you wish to give a read to the first part, please click/tap here.
The title is a powerful phrase, I would urge you to re-read it. It is effective in every context of the work that we do and the play that we love to do.
For example,
Being creative outside your day job,
Being creative outside your company,
Being creative outside your startup for that matter!
Being creative outside your VC fund!
Being creative while starting something of one’s own, i.e., being one’s own CEO, has two attributes when it comes to making decisions.
Andy Grove has a great book called “Only The Paranoids Survive“.
Ben mentions about the book by Andy Grove called “Only the Paranoids Survive“. The book mentions about the decisions that Andy took while converting ‘Intel‘ from memory business to CPU business.
Ben sums up those decisions as ‘war-time’ decisions. The other counterpart of these decisions is called the ‘peace-time’ decisions.
The title of the blog is the title of an interview of Ben Horowitz in conversation with Professor Tom Byers.
When you come out of school, you know some things but there are a whole lot of things you don’t know.
The opening of the talk is with an interesting management skill called the people’s skills. Most technical skills are highly appreciated if one has them. That what may go highly underestimated is the art to manage people.
What people’s skills means exactly beyond delegation of work is knowing what other people who are working with you/want to work with you. This knowledge about the people is in terms of knowing what their motivations are.
This analysis is equally important for the people with whom you are talking to and also whom you are not talking to.
On asking about the nitty-gritties, Ben has mentioned in his best seller book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Tom asked a question about what made him write the book?
Ben replied with an interesting answer. Most management books are written with here’s how cannot screw your company. The real solution lies in knowing what to do post the screw up.
Most management related books are for peace time CEOs
Most venture capitalists tell the CEOs a secret sauce of hiring the A-players/employees which in reality may not be a secret.
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