Ben Horowitz’s new book The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers is quite possibly one of the best church planting books I’ve ever read and it has nothing to do with church planting.
Horowitz shares so many insights from starting businesses, which is very similar to church planting. The hard road of raising funds, building teams, keeping great people and how to handle the high’s and low’s of being a CEO. The insights for lead planters are incredible. I found myself nodding over and over with all the lessons for pastor’s.
The whole book is great. If you are a church planter, thinking about planting or leading a church right now, this is the next book you need to read. It is that good.
Here are a few insights from it:
- If there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.
- A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news.
- Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.
- You don’t make yourself look good by trashing someone who worked for you.
- Hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.
- If your company is a good place to work, you too may live long enough to find your glory.
- Being a good company doesn’t matter when things go well, but it can be the difference between life and death when things go wrong. Things always go wrong.
- There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training.
- The most important difference between big and small companies is the amount of time running versus creating. A desire to do more creating is the right reason to want to join your company.
- If you don’t know what you want, the chances that you’ll get it are extremely low.
- The right kind of ambition is ambition for the company’s success with the executive’s own success only coming as a by-product of the company’s victory. The wrong kind of ambition is ambition for the executive’s personal success regardless of the company’s outcome.
- While I’ve seen executives improve their performance and skill sets, I’ve never seen one lose the support of the organization and then regain it.
- A company will be most successful if the senior managers optimize for the company’s success (think of this as a global optimization) as opposed to their own personal success (local optimization).
- Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
- The CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want.
- When an organization grows in size, things that were previously easy become difficult.
- The further away people are in the organizational chart, the less they will communicate.
- Evaluating people against the future needs of the company based on a theoretical view of how they will perform is counterproductive.
- There is no such thing as a great executive. There is only a great executive for a specific company at a specific point in time.
- Everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO.
- If you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO.
- When my partners and I meet with entrepreneurs, the two key characteristics that we look for are brilliance and courage.
- Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions.
To see other book notes, go here.
