LessonCareer lessonLeadershipFounders and companies
There is often no good option, only the least bad one taken quickly
Ben Horowitz · The Hard Thing About Hard Things
The idea
Horowitz's book is about running a company when every available choice is bad: lay people off or run out of money, sell the business or watch it fail, fire a friend or lose the team. The lesson is not a technique but a recognition. Most management advice assumes a good option exists and the job is to find it. In the hard cases there is none, and the job is to pick the least bad one before the delay makes it worse. Venture and growth interviewers ask about operators rather than multiples, and this is the book that describes what operating under those conditions is like.
When every option is bad, the cost is in the delay; choose the least bad one and move.
When it works
Assessing a management team under stress, and any interview question about a difficult decision you made.
When it may fail
Speed can become recklessness, and some bad situations improve if you wait. The skill is telling a situation that is decaying from one that is merely uncomfortable.
How to use it
Describing a hard decision, name the options you had and why each was bad, then the one you chose and how quickly. An answer with a clean good option was not a hard decision.
Where it came from
Book The Hard Thing About Hard Things · Ben Horowitz
What the source says. Running a company when every available option is bad: useful for venture and growth interviews, where the question is about operators rather than multiples.
Competing perspectives
Argues against
The mistake was how quickly we moved, not where: a chief executive locates the errorIn a post-mortem, separate the direction from the pace and the explanation, and say which one failed.
Connected ideas
Says something similar
A good decision and a good outcome are separate thingsJudge a decision by what was knowable when it was made, and keep the outcome in a separate column.
Concepts
Put it to work on L3VLUP
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