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- Ben Horowitz advice to CEOs “You want to be liked and respected in the long-run. Not the short-run.”
Ben Horowitz advice to CEOs “You want to be liked and respected in the long-run. Not the short-run.”
“You have to be able to tell [your team] the truth in a way that you probably don’t tell most of your friends the truth,” the a16z co-founder explains. “Anthropologically, we want people to like us so we tell them what they want to hear. But on a company level or if your on the board of somebody’s company, you have to be able to tell them what they don’t want to hear. That’s the most important thing you’re going to say. And yes, they’re not going to like it when you say, but over time it can save the company.”
Ben continues:
“That’s what leadership is about. If everybody agrees with the decision, then you didn’t add any value, because they would’ve done that without you. The only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don’t like, and that’s where leadership comes in… That’s the thing that takes practice.”
He gives Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as an example:
“When Jensen talks about how you have to get to near-death to get yourself to do that, I think that’s true. It’s hard to build that [muscle of telling people what they don’t want to hear] if everything is going great.”