Guess who’s back?
As first reported in the November newsletter, I will start making regular contributions here on TOA over the coming months. In addition to posts in the style of the blog I wrote last year, I will also occasionally review books I’ve found helpful over the course of my career.
I thought for a little while about what the first book for this series should be. There were a few excellent candidates (and many horrible ones). I finally settled on Ben Horowitz’s Hard Thing About Hard Things. Unlike the other business books I’ve enjoyed over the years, this one is not written about companies where ‘all is well’. It does not describe the easy decisions made by a market leader with significant margin for error or the obvious investment projects started by a firm protected from hungry competitors.
Rather, Horowitz talks mostly about how to identify the best decision among a set of bad options. This book is for anyone who needs to calculate the correct answer, RIGHT NOW, instead of ‘playing the odds’ and relying on things to work out over the long-term. As the author himself points out, it’s a book about calculus, not statistics.
On the surface, the target reader for this book is a start-up CEO. The book’s many anecdotes mostly come from the author’s the experiences in such a role and its insights into scaling an organization, leading through uncertainty, and assessing executives are all more relevant for this type of CEO than they are for the general reader. However, I still felt there was plenty to learn from it for those interested in general concepts such as leadership, organizational design, or recruiting.
I’ve broken my review of the book into general categories. Over a number of coming Sundays, I’ll post these notes. Hopefully, you find some of my observations as useful as I have.
Until next time,
The Business Bro
