Ceo Short Quotes

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we prioritize time in the market and not timing the market. We prioritize total return and not quick short term gains.

Never confuse a clear path with a short distance.

In short, we needed to view technology as more of an opportunity than a threat, and we had to do so with commitment, enthusiasm, and a sense of urgency.

Sometimes companies prioritize market share over profitability. That may be a good short term strategy, but it's unsustainable and there's a strict time limit on that whether company leadership will admit it or not.

From an evolutionary standpoint, it is natural to do things that make people like you. It enhances your chances for survival. Yet to be a good CEO, in order to be liked in the long run, you must do many things that will upset people in the short run. Unnatural things.

One of the world’s great investors once said to me, “Tom, what do you consider the number-one failing of CEOs?” After I hemmed and hawed, he said, “They don’t read enough.

Elon came to the conclusion early in his career that life is short,” Straubel said. “If you really embrace this, it leaves you with the obvious conclusion that you should be working as hard as you can.

This wasn’t just another company—this was the biggest company by far making subprime loans. And it was engaged in just blatant fraud. They should have taken the CEO out and hung him up by his fucking testicles.

A lot of mothers turn toxic when a divorce or separation takes place. In their bitterness, they use the child as a weapon against the father. And in too many places the law passively supports their toxic behavior and it's the child and the fathers relationship that suffers in the short term. But you can't go against the laws of nature. The importance of fatherhood is indisputable. And children always reach for their fathers.

This wasn’t Fitch or even S&P. This was Moody’s. The aristocrats of the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett. And its CEO was being told he was either a fool or a crook, by Vincent Daniel, from Queens. By

If any publicly traded company was run like the United States, or the UK, Russia—it doesn’t matter, pick a country—the shareholders would revolt! The CEO would be gone in days, and the board of directors shortly thereafter if they didn’t right the ship.

Once, he got himself invited to a meeting with the CEO of Bank of America, Ken Lewis. “I was sitting there listening to him. I had an epiphany. I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, he’s dumb!’ A lightbulb went off. The guy running one of the biggest banks in the world is dumb!

Raymond Smith, former CEO and Chairman of the Bell Atlantic Corporation, once remarked, “Taking the safe road, doing your job, and not making any waves may not get you fired (right away, at least), but it sure won’t do much for your career or your company over the long haul. We’re not dumb. We know that administrators are easy to find and cheap to keep. Leaders—risk takers—are in very short supply. And ones with vision are pure gold.

Carly Fiorina took over Hewlett-Packard shortly before the tech bubble burst. Anne Mulcahy got a shot at being the first female CEO at Xerox—precisely as the company was being investigated by the SEC. What do these leaders have in common? They are women. Women who were given big responsibilities right as the shit hit the fan. Which meant that when they failed—almost inevitably—the problem was blamed on them, not the surrounding circumstances.

Business would be staying in California and celebrating a deal I’d worked a year on instead of rushing back to see you,” he finally said, his voice low and loaded with gravel. “Business would be completing my D.C. trip instead of waking my pilot up for a last-minute flight home. In all my years as CEO, I’ve only cut a work trip short twice, Vivian, and both those instances were because of you.” A wry twist of his lips. “So no, it’s not just fucking business anymore.

A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many walks of life, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making the world much less good than it could be. Elected officials ignore long-term problems because they must pander to the short-term interests of voters. People working for insurance companies rely on technicalities to deny desperately ill patients the care they need. CEOs and investment bankers run extraordinary risks—both for their businesses and for the economy as a whole—because they reap the rewards of success without suffering the penalties of failure. District attorneys continue to prosecute people they know to be innocent because their careers depend on winning cases. Our government fights a war on drugs that creates the very problem of black-market profits and violence that it pretends to solve. We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us more honest and ethical than we tend to be. The project of building them is distinct from—and, in my view, even more important than—an individual’s refining his personal ethical code.

The guest speaker was Herb Sandler, the CEO of a giant savings and loan called Golden West Financial Corporation. “Someone asked him if he believed in the free checking model,” recalls Eisman. “And he said, ‘Turn off your tape recorders.’ Everyone turned off their tape recorders. And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people—in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks.

Travis Sanchez rubbed a hand over his head as he stepped into an elevator at the Red Stone Security building. His Mohawk was gone and he wore his hair in a buzz cut these days. It was probably his military background, but he always came back to this cut out of habit. The walk to Harrison's office was too short. He wasn't sure why his boss had called him in after his last security detail, but a small burst of panic had detonated in his gut. He loved this job, but there had been some issues with the CEO he'd recently been guarding not following Travis' orders. The asshole had almost gotten himself killed and now Travis wondered if his head was on the chopping block because of it.

The Head Scissor and CEO of a major corporation was once asked to give a seminar on the topic of innovation to a young and thriving startup company. After looking out upon the big-eyed crowd of young and inexperienced scissors standing there on their snippers, the aged guru opened and closed with a few thoughts that made every scissor look deep within themselves. She said, “The heart asks us to make incisions by following it along the path of intuition. Otherwise, we can be certain we’re just following behind someone else’s dotted lines. Every morning when I get out of the shower and look in the mirror, I say to myself, ‘You stand tall with long legs and bright eyes, but what good are you, if you can’t stay on the cutting edge of your self?’” After receiving a thunderous applause she gave a knowing smile and made her exit.

The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, and so on. A few Wall Street CEOs had been fired for their roles in the subprime mortgage catastrophe, but most remained in their jobs, and they, of all people, became important characters operating behind the closed doors, trying to figure out what to do next. With them were a handful of government officials—the same government officials who should have known a lot more about what Wall Street firms were doing, back when they were doing it. All shared a distinction: They had proven far less capable of grasping basic truths in the heart of the U.S. financial system than a one-eyed money manager with Asperger’s syndrome.

To economists, everything revolves around scarcity - after all, even the biggest spenders can't buy everything. However, the perception of scarcity is not ubiquitous. An empty schedule feels different than a jam-packed workday. And that's not some harmless little feeling. Scarcity impinges on your mind. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. What that thing is doesn't much matter; whether it's too little time, money, friendship, food - it all contributes to experience a "scarcity mentality". And this has benefits. People who experience a sense of scarcity are good at managing their short-term problems. Poor people have an incredible ability - in the short term - to make ends meet, the same way that overworked CEOs can power through to close a deal. Despite all this, the drawbacks of a "scarcity mentality" are greater than the benefits. Scarcity narrows your focus to your immediate lack, to the meeting that's starting in five minutes or the bills that need to be paid tomorrow. The long-term perspective goes out of the window. "Scarcity consumes you", Shafir explains. "You're less able to focus on other things that are also important to you." ... There's a key distinction though between people with busy lives and those living in poverty: You can't take a break from poverty.

When Musk took delivery of his F1, CNN was there to cover it. “Just three years ago I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor,” he told the camera sheepishly, “and now obviously, I’ve got a million-dollar car… it’s just a moment in my life.” While other McLaren F1 owners around the world—the sultan of Brunei, Wyclef Jean, and Jay Leno, among others—could comfortably afford it, Musk’s purchase had put a sizable dent in his bank account. And unlike other owners, Musk drove the car to work—and declined to insure it. As Musk drove Thiel up Sand Hill Road in the F1, the car was the subject of their chat. “It was like this Hitchcock movie,” Thiel remembered, “where we’re talking about the car for fifteen minutes. We’re supposed to be preparing for the meeting—and we’re talking about the car.” During their ride, Thiel looked at Musk and reportedly asked, “So, what can this thing do?” “Watch this,” Musk replied, flooring the accelerator and simultaneously initiating a lane change on Sand Hill Road. In retrospect, Musk admitted that he was outmatched by the F1. “I didn’t really know how to drive the car,” he recalled. “There’s no stability systems. No traction control. And the car gets so much power that you can break the wheels free at even fifty miles an hour.” Thiel recalls the car in front of them coming fast into view—then Musk swerving to avoid it. The McLaren hit an embankment, was tossed into the air—“like a discus,” Musk remembered——then slammed violently into the ground. “The people that saw it happen thought we were going to die,” he recalled. Thiel had not worn a seat belt, but astonishingly, neither he nor Musk were hurt. Musk’s “work of art” had not fared as well, having now taken a distinctly cubist turn. Post-near-death experience, Thiel dusted himself off on the side of the road and hitchhiked to the Sequoia offices, where he was joined by Musk a short while later. X.com’s CEO, Bill Harris, was also waiting at the Sequoia office, and he recalled that both Thiel and Musk were late but offered no explanation for their delay. “They never told me,” Harris said. “We just had the meeting.” Reflecting on it, Musk found humor in the experience: “I think it’s safe to say Peter wouldn’t be driving with me again.” Thiel wrung some levity out of the moment, too. “I’d achieved lift-off with Elon,” he joked, “but not in a rocket.

I believe that social media, and the internet as a whole, have negatively impacted our ability to both think long-term and to focus deeply on the task in front of us. It is no surprise, therefore, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, prohibited his children from using phones or tablets—even though his business was to sell millions of them to his customers! The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail). As we demand more and more stimulation, our focus is increasingly geared toward the short term and our vision of reality becomes distorted. This leads us to adopt inaccurate mental models such as: Success should come quickly and easily, or I don’t need to work hard to lose weight or make money. Ultimately, this erroneous concept distorts our vision of reality and our perception of time. We can feel jealous of people who seem to have achieved overnight success. We can even resent popular YouTubers. Even worse, we feel inadequate. It can lead us to think we are just not good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. Therefore, we feel the need to compensate by hustling harder. We have to hurry before we miss the opportunity. We have to find the secret that will help us become successful. And, in this frenetic race, we forget one of the most important values of all: patience. No, watching motivational videos all day long won’t help you reach your goals. But, performing daily consistent actions, sustained over a long period of time will. Staying calm and focusing on the one task in front of you every day will. The point is, to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.

The president couldn’t stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was obvious to everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked. He was ever uncomprehending about why everyone did not like him, or why it should be so difficult to get everyone to like him. He might be happy throughout the day as a parade of union steel workers or CEOs trooped into the White House, with the president praising his visitors and them praising him, but that good cheer would sour in the evening after several hours of cable television. Then he would get on the phone, and in unguarded ramblings to friends and others, conversations that would routinely last for thirty or forty minutes, and could go much longer, he would vent, largely at the media and his staff. In what was termed by some of the self-appointed Trump experts around him—and everyone was a Trump expert—he seemed intent on “poisoning the well,” in which he created a loop of suspicion, disgruntlement, and blame heaped on others. When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or sadistic fashion, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short—a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington. His callers, largely because they found his conversation

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” –Steve Jobs Co-founder and former CEO of Apple

For what it's worth, you're about as much of a figurehead CEO as the man behind the curtain in Oz.

Strelsin asked CEOs an easy question: “How would you describe the most important aspect of your role in the organization?” The CEOs whose companies were inconsistent in their performance prioritized creating a vision, building a specific corporate culture, and developing a specific business strategy. But when Strelsin posed the same question to CEOs of industry-leading companies, most said that they had made it their personal mission, above all else, to simplify the lives of those who worked below them. They pursued simplification in a number of ways: they simplified their strategies so their peers and subordinates could focus on the most important challenges. They simplified their hierarchies, so that their companies could execute their strategies more effectively. They made it a priority to communicate in clear prose that inspired everyone to join in their company’s respective mission. In short, the most successful executives in Strelsin’s study excelled in their jobs because they regarded themselves not merely as CEOs, but as chief simplifiers.

We’ll see how reducing the jaw-dropping levels of CEO salaries isn’t actually the most effective way to reform pay to benefit society. We’ll understand how an investor selling his shares in the short term can encourage businesses to act more long term. We’ll learn how a company using cash to buy back shares rather than investing it may create long-run value, not just for its shareholders, but also the economy as a whole.

Something I’ve learned from both investors and entrepreneurs is that no one makes good decisions all the time. The most impressive people are packed full of horrendous ideas that are often acted upon. Take Amazon. It’s not intuitive to think a failed product launch at a major company would be normal and fine. Intuitively, you’d think the CEO should apologize to shareholders. But CEO Jeff Bezos said shortly after the disastrous launch of the company’s Fire Phone: If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now. I am not kidding. Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.

Do not judge whether you made the “right” or “wrong” decision based upon a short-term outcome.

I recently recommended to Lea Endres, CEO of NationBuilder, which builds software for community leaders, that she follow Senghor’s lead. NationBuilder was operating close to the red and Endres was frustrated because, despite her reminding everyone that cash collection was a priority, she couldn’t get her team to care enough about it. Our conversation went like this: Lea: I’m really worried about cash collections. We use this outsourced finance firm and they don’t care. We have a low cash balance and we got surprised last month. A couple more surprises and we’re in deep trouble. Ben: Is there a team on it? How much do you need to collect this month? Lea: Yes. And $1.1 million at least. Ben: If you have a crisis situation and you need the team to execute, meet with them every day and even twice a day if necessary. That will show them this is a top priority. At the beginning of each meeting you say, “Where’s my money?” They will start making excuses like “Boo Boo was supposed to call me and didn’t,” or “The system didn’t tell me the right thing.” Those excuses are the key, because that’s the knowledge you’re missing. Once you know that the excuse is that “Fred didn’t answer my email,” you can tell Fred to answer the damned email and also tell the person making the excuse that you expect way more persistence. The meetings will start out running long, but two weeks later they’ll be short, because when you say, “Where’s my money?” they are going to want to say, “Right here, Lea!” Two weeks later: Lea: You wouldn’t believe some of the excuses. One was that we have an auto email that is one sentence long that tells customers they are late—but it doesn’t tell them what to do! I’m like, “Well, then, let’s fix the damned email!” We’re making progress and they know I want my money. End of quarter: Lea: We collected $1.6 million in September! And the team loves hearing me say “Where’s my money?!?!” To change a culture, you can’t just give lip service to what you want. Your people must feel the urgency of it.

From mid-2011 to about mid-2016, employees at Wells Fargo Bank opened over three and a half million fake bank accounts. As The New York Times reported in 2016, “Some customers noticed the deception when they were charged unexpected fees, received credit or debit cards in the mail that they did not request, or started hearing from debt collectors about accounts they did not recognize. But most of the sham accounts went unnoticed, as employees would routinely close them shortly after opening them.” Ultimately, 5,300 Wells Fargo employees were fired as a result of their involvement in these deceptive practices. Practices that then CEO John Stumpf told Congress “go against everything regarding our core principles, our ethics and our culture.

I think what’s occurring is a stealthy rebranding: the word ‘problem’ has become too emotionally loaded to be uttered in polite company in case we think bad things about the companies responsible. So software bugs are now issues rather than problems, even if they stop our computers working and ruin our day. Or, for my CEO, the bug is an opportunity. He was in the software business, and the only opportunity a broken computer gives you is the opportunity to wait for tech support to call back. We now have ‘performance issues’ with staff who fall asleep on their keyboard, or ‘brand issues’ with companies that nobody likes, or, worst of all, ‘balance sheet issues’, as described by Lehman Brothers, shortly before it ceased to be Lehman Brothers. At least they didn’t call it a ‘balance sheet opportunity’, though I bet someone suggested it. Rule of thumb on issues: it doesn’t matter whether your company admits to balance sheet issues or problems, it still might be time to send out your CV.

ead like Beyoncé, hustle like Dwayne Johnson, and slay like Rihanna. You’re the CEO of your life, the rockstar of your own show, and the trendsetter of your destiny. So, put on your crown, channel your inner boss babe, and strut your stuff like the fierce and fabulous leader you were born to be. Life’s too short for mediocrity, darling. Embrace your power, command your domain, and let your light shine bright like a diamond in a world full of mere pebbles. You’ve got this!

Lead like Beyoncé, hustle like Dwayne Johnson, and slay like Rihanna. You’re the CEO of your life, the rockstar of your own show, and the trendsetter of your destiny. So, put on your crown, channel your inner boss, babe, and strut your stuff like the fierce and fabulous leader you were born to be. Life’s too short for mediocrity, darling. Embrace your power, command your domain, and let your light shine bright like a diamond in a world full of mere pebbles. You’ve got this!

Chris Argyris, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, wrote a lovely article in 1977,191 in which he looked at the performance of Harvard Business School graduates ten years after graduation. By and large, they got stuck in middle management, when they had all hoped to become CEOs and captains of industry. What happened? Argyris found that when they inevitably hit a roadblock, their ability to learn collapsed: What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.… Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure.… [T]hey become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.192 [italics mine] A year or two after Wave, Jeff Huber was running our Ads engineering team. He had a policy that any notable bug or mistake would be discussed at his team meeting in a “What did we learn?” session. He wanted to make sure that bad news was shared as openly as good news, so that he and his leaders were never blind to what was really happening and to reinforce the importance of learning from mistakes. In one session, a mortified engineer confessed, “Jeff, I screwed up a line of code and it cost us a million dollars in revenue.” After leading the team through the postmortem and fixes, Jeff concluded, “Did we get more than a million dollars in learning out of this?” “Yes.” “Then get back to work.”193 And it works in other settings too. A Bay Area public school, the Bullis Charter School in Los Altos, takes this approach to middle school math. If a child misses a question on a math test, they can try the question again for half credit. As their principal, Wanny Hersey, told me, “These are smart kids, but in life they are going to hit walls once in a while. It’s vital they master geometry, algebra one, and algebra two, but it’s just as important that they respond to failure by trying again instead of giving up.” In the 2012–2013 academic year, Bullis was the third-highest-ranked middle school in California.194

The only way to keep up with all of this work was to do what SpaceX had promised from the beginning: operate in the spirit of a Silicon Valley start-up. Musk was always looking for brainy engineers who had not just done well at school but had done something exceptional with their talents. When he found someone good, Musk was relentless in courting him or her to come to SpaceX. Bryan Gardner, for example, first met Musk at a space rave in the hangars at the Mojave airport and a short while later started talking about a job. Gardner was having some of his academic work sponsored by Northrop Grumman. “Elon said, ‘We’ll buy them out,’” Gardner said. “So, I e-mailed him my resume at two thirty A.M., and he replied back in thirty minutes addressing everything I put in there point by point. He said, ‘When you interview make sure you can talk concretely about what you do rather than use buzzwords.’ It floored me that he would take the time to do this.

The proportion of CEOs who came from wealthy families had dropped from almost half in 1900 and a third in 1950 to 5.5 percent by 1976.23 The CEO of 1976 was still disproportionately likely to be Episcopalian but much less so than in 1900—and by 1976 he was also disproportionately likely to be Jewish, unheard of in 1920 or earlier. In short, social and economic background was no longer nearly as important in 1976 as in the first half of the century. Educational

Our constant concern, in writing regulations, was to preserve financial stability without constraining credit or economic growth any more than necessary. Two years earlier, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon had asked me at a public forum whether we had calculated the cumulative economic effect of all the new rules we were putting into place. We did as a matter of course attempt to analyze the costs and benefits of individual rules, and even groups of related rules, but I told him that a comprehensive calculation wasn’t practical. My answer wasn’t very satisfying, and Jamie’s willingness to challenge me in public on behalf of his fellow bankers made him a short-lived hero on Wall Street. A better answer would have been to point out to Jamie the immeasurable economic and human cost of failing to write adequately tough rules and permitting a repeat of the crisis we had recently endured.

Discussions of entrepreneurship tend to focus on the personalities and attitudes of top management people, and especially of the chief executive. 4 Of course, any top management can damage and stifle entrepreneurship within its company. It’s easy enough. All it takes is to say ‘No’ to every new idea and to keep on saying it for a few years – and then make sure that those who came up with the new ideas never get a reward or a promotion and become ex-employees fairly swiftly. It is far less certain, however, that top management personalities and attitudes can by themselves – without the proper policies and practices – create an entrepreneurial business, which is what most of the books on entrepreneurship assert, at least by implication. In the few short-lived cases I know of, the companies were built and still run by the founder. Even then, when it gets to be successful the company soon ceases to be entrepreneurial unless it adopts the policies and practices of entrepreneurial management. The reason why top management personalities and attitudes do not suffice in any but the very young or very small business is, of course, that even a medium-sized enterprise is a pretty large organization. It requires a good many people who know what they are supposed to do, want to do it, are motivated towards doing it, and are supplied with both the tools and continuous reaffirmation. Otherwise there is only lip service; entrepreneurship soon becomes confined to the CEO’s speeches.

The opponents’ most substantive argument was that, whatever the short-run benefits of bailouts, protecting firms from the consequences of their own risky behavior would lead to riskier behavior in the longer run. I certainly agreed that, in a capitalist system, the market must be allowed to discipline individuals or firms that make bad decisions. Frank Borman, the former astronaut who became CEO of Eastern Airlines (which went bankrupt), put it nicely a quarter-century earlier: “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.” But in September 2008 I was absolutely convinced that invoking moral hazard in the middle of a major financial crisis was misguided and dangerous. I am sure that Paulson and Geithner agreed. “You have a neighbor, who smokes in bed. . . . Suppose he sets fire to his house,” I would say later in an interview. “You might say to yourself . . . ‘I’m not gonna call the fire department. Let his house burn down. It’s fine with me.’ But then, of course, what if your house is made of wood? And it’s right next door to his house? What if the whole town is made of wood?” The editorial writers of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal in September 2008 would, presumably, have argued for letting the fire burn. Saving the sleepy smoker would only encourage others to smoke in bed. But a much better course is to put out the fire, then punish the smoker, and, if necessary, make and enforce new rules to promote fire safety.

Growth sucks cash. This is the first law of entrepreneurial gravity. And nothing ages a CEO and his or her team faster than being short of cash. In fact, Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, in their best-selling book Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck — Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, found that successful companies held three to 10 times more cash assets than average for their industries, and they did so from the time they started. (We highly recommend that you read this book, Collins’ first that directly addresses growth firms.)

Business was booming for Tiffany & Co. in the late 1990s, thanks to the introduction of a new affordable silver jewellery line. The $110 silver charm bracelet inscribed with the Tiffany name was coveted by teenage girls, causing sales of the new silver product line to skyrocket 67% between 1997 and 2002. By 2003, company earnings had doubled and the silver jewellery line accounted for a third of Tiffany’s U.S. sales. And yet the queues of excited girls didn’t fill the store managers with joy. Sure, sales were up and stores were busy, but the people close to the brand, who understood its heritage, began to worry that this lower price point would forever change how the brand was perceived by its high-end customers. “We didn’t want the brand to be defined by any single product.” —Michael Kowalski, CEO, Tiffany & Co. Despite some unease from investors, Tiffany raised prices on their most popular silver products by 30% over the next three years and managed to halt the growth of their highly profitable silver line. And so the company sacrificed short-term gain and profits for the long-term good of the brand by telling the story they wanted customers to believe—that Tiffany’s represents something special. A client recently told me about her friend’s excited engagement announcement on Facebook. All she did was post a photo of the Tiffany blue box—not a picture of the ring in sight. The box alone was enough to say everything she wanted to say. QUESTIONS FOR YOU How are you least like the competition?

Articulate each meeting’s purpose (Making an announcement? Delivering a report?). Terminate the meeting once the purpose is accomplished. Follow up with short communications summarizing the discussion, spelling out new work assignments and deadlines for completing them. General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan’s legendary mastery of meeting follow-up helped secure GM’s industry dominance in the mid-twentieth century.

The CEOs of every major Wall Street firm were also on the wrong end of the gamble. All of them, without exception, either ran their public corporations into bankruptcy or were saved from bankruptcy by the United States government. They all got rich, too.

Of course, to properly reward the “doers” you must correctly define what a doer is. This is central to the idea of execution. Simply put, a doer is a person who gets things done. Doing is meeting goals. Some goals are legitimately short-term goals that yield short-term results and are properly compensated on a short-term basis. But other goals are long-term and by definition we will not know if we have achieved those goals for some time. Consequently the people striving to meet those goals should be compensated on a long-term basis, with some portion of that long- term compensation based on achieving critical milestones toward the goal. And there are some goals that are so long- term that compensation should only be awarded when a person retires and his or her contributions to meeting those extremely long-term goals can be assessed. Leaders must take responsibility for setting the right rewards for doers. This is particularly true of boards of directors, many of which made egregiously bad calls in rewarding poor performance by the CEOs of their companies. Linked together as these behaviors are, rewarding the doers must be based on the correct metrics. For too long companies—and this often involved boards of directors— set “shareholder value” as one of the goals to be measured and rewarded in compensation plans. But the directors and CEOs who set shareholder value as a goal missed an essential point. Increasing shareholder value is an outcome, not a goal. If you set the right strategy with the right goals and execute well to implement the strategy and achieve the goals—growth in earnings per share, good cash flow, improved market share, for example—then shareholder value is the result. Get everything else right and shareholder value will take care of itself. EXPAND

The U.S. corporate strategists and CEO had concentrated only on the economic and financial research, at the expense of cultural, social, and political information and data. Shortly

Now, I’m sure that at various times you will take exception to what you read in this book. “This may be fine at Intel,” you will say, “but it would never fly at PDQ, where I work. Nothing does until the Old Man himself decrees it. Short of a palace revolution, I can’t use anything you recommend.” Let me assure you that you will be able to use most of what I say. As a middle manager, of any sort, you are in effect a chief executive of an organization yourself. Don’t wait for the principles and practices you find appealing to be imposed from the top. As a micro CEO, you can improve your own and your group’s performance and productivity, whether or not the rest of the company follows suit.

Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, calls his approach “customer obsessed.” Everything is focused upon the requirements of Amazon’s customers. The competition is ignored, the traditional marketing requirements are ignored. The focus is on simple, customer-driven questions: what do the customers want; how can their needs best be satisfied; what can be done better to enhance customer service and customer value? Focus on the customer, Bezos argues, and the rest takes care of itself. Many companies claim to aspire to this philosophy, but few are able to follow it. Usually it is only possible where the head of the company, the CEO, is also the founder. Once the company passes control to others, especially those who follow the traditional MBA dictum of putting profit above customer concerns, the story goes downhill. Profits may indeed increase in the short term, but eventually the product quality deteriorates to the point where customers desert. Quality only comes about by continual focus on, and attention to, the people who matter: customers.

America today is not the same nation as when you were born. Depending on your age, if you were born in America, your home nation was a significantly different land than it is today:   ·                    America didn’t allow aborting babies in the womb; ·                     Same sex marriage was not only illegal, no one ever talked about it, or even seriously considered the possibility; (“The speed and breadth of change (in the gay movement) has just been breathtaking.”, New York Times, June 21, 2009) ·                    Mass media was clean and non-offensive. Think of The I Love Lucy Show or The Walton Family, compared with what is aired today; ·                    The United States government did not take $500 million dollars every year from the taxpayers and give it to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. ·                    Videogames that glorify violence, cop killing and allow gamesters who have bought millions of copies, to have virtual sex with women before killing them, did not exist. ·                    Americans’ tax dollars did not fund Title X grants to Planned Parenthood who fund a website which features videos that show a “creepy guidance counselor who gives advice to teens on how to have (safe) sex and depict teens engaged in sex.” ·                    Americans didn’t owe $483,000 per household for unfunded retirement and health care obligations (Peter G. Peterson Foundation). ·                    The phrase “sound as a dollar” meant something. ·                    The Federal government’s debt was manageable.            American Christian missionaries who have been abroad for relatively short times say they find it hard to believe how far this nation has declined morally since they were last in the country. In just a two week period, not long ago, these events all occurred: the Iowa Supreme Court declared that same sex marriage was legal in the State; the President on a foreign tour declared that “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…” and a day later bowed before the King of the nation that supplied most of the 9/11 terrorists; Vermont became the first State to authorize same sex marriage by legislative action, as opposed to judicial dictate; the CEO of General Motors was fired by the federal government; an American ship was boarded and its crew captured by pirates for the first time in over 200 years; and a major Christian leader/author apologized on Larry King Live for supporting California’s Proposition 8 in defense of traditional marriage, reversing his earlier position. The pace of societal change is rapidly accelerating.

On Uncertainty My parents and I were living in a refugee settlement in Vienna after we left the former Soviet Union. Everything was uncertain, scary, and pretty terrible. This didn’t stop my dad from announcing one day that we were going to visit the opera house in Vienna. I thought playing tourists was ridiculous—we had no money, no citizenship, and no home. “We don’t know if we’ll ever be back here again,” my dad said. “Life is short. It’s stupid to sit here and wallow in our troubles.” Now I realize … he’s right. Nataly Kogan, cofounder and CEO of Happier, Inc.

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.

Forbearance or Deferment: Which Way to Go? Repaying student loan is a long journey as The Student Loan Help Center CEO, Bruce Mesnekoff said, at times you might face some potholes on the road, making your ride a bit difficult but there are some ways you can opt for help. Student loan forbearance and deferment are such two options which help you when you are facing money crunch and need some time to repay your student loans. Both of the options are specific to every individual depending on your financial state. Forbearance or deferment can be considered if you want to postpone your repayment for some duration or want to decrease the amount. Both of these are discussed in detail in this article. Forbearance Forbearance is used when you are facing monetary issues for a short period of time i.e. when you know you will come out of the money problems soon. Forbearance is provided for maximum period of one year at one time.Now there are two kinds of forbearance, mandatory and discretionary. When forbearance is must it’s called mandatory and this happens when: Your student loan repayment is 20% or more of your grossly monthly income. You are eligible for public loan forgiveness You are enrolled in dental internship or medical internship You are serving in a national service position Forbearance may or may not be provided by servicer if you are facing financial crunch or illness. One word of caution here would be to at least pay your interest every month because during forbearance you accruemonthly interest and if you don’t pay it as it gets added to principal. As a result you have to a pay huge amount at the end of the loan and also after forbearance is over to become current. Deferment Deferment also works onsimilar lines as forbearance. Though there is one advantage that subsidized direct loan, Perkins loans, federal Stafford loans do notaccrue interest during deferment, only non-subsidized loans accrue interest. You can defer loan repayment for the entire duration if you are in school or on military duty. If you are unemployed or facing any financial hardship the deferment period is of three years. You can qualify for deferment under following circumstances: If you are in school If you are on active military duty If you are qualifying for Perkins loan cancellation If you are unemployed If you are receiving federal or state assistance. Using deferment or forbearance is good option to keep your account “current” and save it from becoming delinquent or going in default. It saves your credit rating. If provided the opportunity to choose out of the two, always try and go for deferment if you can qualify for it as it’s more economical than forbearance. Contact The Student Loan Help Center to know more about Consolidation of your Student Loans.

In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? My biggest shift came after listening to a successful CEO talk about his philosophy for hiring people. When his company grew and he ran out of time to interview people himself, he had his employees rate new candidates on a 1–10 scale. The only stipulation was they couldn’t choose 7. It immediately dawned on me how many invitations I was receiving that I would rate as a 7—speeches, weddings, coffees, even dates. If I thought something was a 7, there was a good chance I felt obligated to do it. But if I have to decide between a 6 or an 8, it’s a lot easier to quickly determine whether or not I should even consider it.

A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.

In my first three years as CEO, we wound up changing out about half of my staff members, replacing them with leaders who bought in strongly to One Honeywell.

These days company annual reports can be huge documents, full of detailed information, much of which is of limited interest to the average investor. However, do focus on directors' shareholdings - any changes compared with last year, the level of borrowings and particularly the comments of the chairman and the CEO on future prospects. A comment such as 'We are now well placed to benefit from any improvement in the world economy' usually means don't expect much improvement in the short term. However, comments like 'current order intake and profitability are running well ahead of last year' are much more encouraging.

A few years ago, most of these authors wouldn’t have been published at all—and that would have been enough to discourage many of them from writing a book in the first place. But today, the economics of publishing have fallen so low that nearly everyone can do it. That means people can write books for whatever reason they want, and they don’t need to depend on some publisher deciding if the book is worth taking to market. The effect of this is being felt throughout the industry, right up to the giant booksellers. In 2005, Barnes & Noble sold 20 percent more unique titles than it had in 2004, something its CEO, Steve Riggio, attributes to three forces: (1) the efficiencies of print-on-demand, which keeps more books in print; (2) the increase in the number of smaller and independent publishers; and (3) self-publishing. “Over the next few years, the traditional definition of what a 'published book' is will have less meaning,” he says. “Individuals will increasingly use the Internet as a first stage to publish their work, whether they are books, short stories, works in progress, or articles on their area of expertise. The best of this work will turn into physical books. I tend to be sanguine about the book industry’s prospects because a whole new and efficient means of first-step publishing is emerging and rapidly becoming more sophisticated.” One of the big differences between the head and the tail of producers is that the farther down you are in the tail, the more likely you are to have to keep your day job. And that’s okay. The distinction between “professional” producers and “amateurs” is blurring and may, in fact, ultimately become irrelevant. We make not just what we’re paid to make, but also what we want to make. And both can have value.

While the rich became richer, the taxation policy of the government, instead of correcting this trend, actively strengthened it. One of the first decisions of the first Modi government was to abolish the wealth tax that had been introduced in 1957. While the fiscal resources generated by this tax were never significant, the decision was more than a symbolic one.126 The wealth tax was replaced with an income tax increase of 2 percent for households that earned more than Rs 10 million (133,333 USD) annually.127 Few people pay income tax in India anyway: only 14.6 million people (2 percent of the population) did in 2019. As a result, the income-tax-to-GDP ratio remained below 11 percent. Not only has the Modi government not tried to introduce any reforms to change this, but it has instead increased indirect taxes (such as excise taxes), which are the most unfair as they affect everyone, irrespective of income. Taxes on alcohol and petroleum products are a case in point. As some state governments have also imposed their own taxes, this strategy means that India has one of the highest taxation rates on fuel in the world. The share of indirect taxes in the state’s fiscal resources has increased under the Modi government to reach 50 percent of the total taxes—compared to 39 percent under UPA I and 44 percent under UPA II.128 Modi’s taxation policy, a supply-side economics approach, is in keeping with the managerial rhetoric of promoting the spirit of enterprise that the prime minister, who readily presents himself as an efficiency-conscious “apolitical CEO,” relishes. One of the neoliberal measures the Modi government enacted in the name of economic rationality, right from his very first budget in 2015, was to lower the corporate tax.129 For existing companies it was reduced from 30 to 22 percent, and for manufacturing firms incorporated after October 1, 2019 that started operations before March 31, 2023, it was reduced from 25 to 15 percent—the biggest reduction in twenty-eight years. In addition to these tax reductions, the government withdrew the enhanced surcharge on long- and short-term capital gains for foreign portfolio investors as well as domestic portfolio investors.130

In the longer term, business itself will be harmed by shifting from R&D to financial manipulations. In earlier days, that might have been a concern. But managerial ethic has shifted from the time when viability of the firm was a serious concern to today’s focus on gain tomorrow. The long-term prospects for the firm become lesser considerations—or for human society generally. Nothing could reveal this shift with more brilliant clarity than a matter already discussed: the virtually reflexive decisions to race toward destruction, with eyes open, if it yields short-term gain. Right now profits are spectacular and CEO salaries have skyrocketed to the stratosphere, dragging other managerial rewards with them, while for the general population, real wages stagnate, social spending is meager, unions and other interferences with “sound economics” are dismantled. The best of all possible worlds. So why care if my firm will go under after I’ve moved to greener pastures, or for that matter, why care if I leave to my grandchildren a world in which they have some chance for decent survival? Capitalist mentality gone insane. There is, of course, the usual problem. The rascal multitude. They’re not too happy about the undermining of functioning democracy and basic rights. I should add the same is true in Europe. In fact, even more so. The attack on democracy in Europe is even sharper than here. Significant decisions about society and politics are out of the hands of the population. They’re made by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels: the IMF, the Central Bank, the European Commission. All of this, all over the world, is leading to anger, resentment, and bitterness. You see it right now in the Yellow Vest movement in France, but it’s everywhere. In election after election, the centrist parties are collapsing. It’s happening here, too. Parties happen to be keeping their names in our rigid two-party system, but the centrist elements are losing their grip.

Smart Brevity’s Core 4 Smart Brevity, in written form, has four main parts, all easy to learn and put into practice—and then teach. They don’t apply in every circumstance but will help you begin to get your mind around the shifts you need to make. 1 A muscular “tease”: Whether in a tweet, headline or email subject line, you need six or fewer strong words to yank someone’s attention away from Tinder or TikTok. 2 One strong first sentence, or “lede”: Your opening sentence should be the most memorable—tell me something I don’t know, would want to know, should know. Make this sentence as direct, short and sharp as possible. 3 Context, or “Why it matters”: We’re all faking it. Mike and I learned this speaking to Fortune 500 CEOs. We all know a lot about a little. We’re too ashamed or afraid to ask, but we almost always need you to explain why your new fact, idea or thought matters. 4 The choice to learn more, or “Go deeper”: Don’t force someone to read or hear more than they want. Make it their decision. If they decide “yes,” what follows should be truly worth their time.

Investment firms are buying up more vacation homes, aiming to cash in on growing demand from tourists and remote workers. Most vacation rental homes are owned by small-time owners who list their properties on websites such as Airbnb Inc., but the number of financial firms investing in the sector is growing. New York-based investment firm Saluda Grade is launching a venture with short-term- rental operator AvantStay Inc. to buy about $500 million of homes, the companies said Tuesday. Saluda Grade said it is also looking to raise debt by selling mortgage bonds backed by its homes to investors, the first vacation-rental mortgage securitization, according to the company. Andes STR, a startup that buys and manages short-term rental homes on behalf of investors, also recently signed a deal with Chilean investment firm WEG Capital to buy roughly $80 million of properties in the U.S., Andes said. These investors are betting they can get higher returns if they rent out homes by the night instead of by the year. Low-interest rates have made it more attractive to borrow and Buy Traditional Rental Homes, inflating property prices and making it harder for new buyers to turn a profit. That has prompted some institutions and wealthy families to look in more obscure corners of the property market where competition is smaller, investment advisers say. Some are turning to investments in vacation homes, where demand has surged in many places during the pandemic as more people choose to work from remote locations and leisure travel heated up last year. “There’s a lot more yield available in the short-term market,” said Saluda Grade’s chief executive, Ryan Craft. It is the latest sign of how the pandemic is changing the way people work and live, and how real-estate investors are angling to find new ways to profit from these shifts. Saluda Grade is targeting homes within driving distance of major population centers, Mr. Craft said. His company will buy the homes and AvantStay will manage them for a fee. But while vacation-rental homes can offer higher returns, they also pose challenges to investors. Mortgages are usually more expensive and harder to get for short-term rentals than for owner-occupied homes, said Giri Devanur, CEO of reAlpha Tech Corp., a startup that wants to pool money from small-time investors to buy short-term-rental homes.

I believe that social media, and the internet as a whole, have negatively impacted our ability to both think long-term and to focus deeply on the task in front of us. It is no surprise, therefore, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, prohibited his children from using phones or tablets—even though his business was to sell millions of them to his customers!

We are being seduced into accepting truncated, short-term, CEO versions of the world’s wholly human race. The loudest voices are urging those already living in day-to-day dread to think of the future in military terms—as a cause for and expression of war. We are being bullied into understanding the human project as a manliness contest where women and children are the most dispensable collateral.

So when Geveden became CEO, he wrote a short memo on his expectations for teamwork. "...I expect disagreement with my decisions at the time we're trying to make decisions, and that's a sign of organizational health," he told me. "After decisions are made, we want compliance and support...

This man had been hiding an actual, honest-to-god six-pack beneath his perfect-fitting clothes. His broad chest tapered down to a narrow waist, the way he wore his shorts making him look like he was a goddamn underwear model instead of a doctor or CEO or whatever the hell he was. Frederick wasn't just attractive, I realized. He was a Greek god.

Additionally, I am also the CEO and co-founder of GoalSumo.com - one of the web's most powerful goal achievement and productivity systems ever developed, a strategic planning approach where you can engineer your most fantastic dream life in just a few short years. Whatever that dream is for you, Fastlane can make it happen.

Here is a stark example. If you have time, I suggest watching the YouTube video of the January 2000 presentation by the president of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling, and his senior management on the launch of Enron Broadband.2 I dare you not to be impressed. The guys are poised, confident, and, at least to my eyes, extremely competent. It is hard to find fault with their strategy or vision, and their execution plan for broadband services seems spot on. However, in less than two years after this impressive presentation, Enron went bankrupt, and in 2006 Skilling was sent to prison for perpetrating a massive fraud.3 Except for a few short sellers, no professional analysts or investors could have guessed what was going on at Enron even though the management was quite open to the media and regularly gave interviews. I know what you are thinking. Am I building my entire case on an outlier like Enron? Let’s look at it another way. I assume you have read the interviews of many CEOs or company presidents. Did any mention that they don’t care for the customer, that they have stopped innovating, or that they hire people who have been rejected by other companies? Have you ever heard a company leader disparage their products or services or admit that their competition is doing a better job or that they are sick and tired of company politics?

Real estate investment expert, Sief Khafagi is changing the game with short-term rentals. A former techie who worked at Facebook for five years building the second-largest engineering organization across the world, Sief is currently the Co-Founder and CEO of Techvestor. He and his team have helped thousands of investors diversify their portfolios to add real estate and benefit from the success of short-term rental investments. He led the company in building its proprietary sourcing technology.

Sief Khafagi is the CEO & Co-Founder of Techvestor. He has helped thousands of professionals and real estate investors passively invest in short-term rentals, an emerging asset class that includes Airbnb.

perfect

Only myopics judge people, relationships, businesses with short term lens. Any startup or public company that survived the dot com bust and 9/11 came out bigger than anyone imagined. If India wants an ecosystem like USA or China, new age companies need nurturing & patience vs. criticism or outcast.

The decision to disrupt a business model that is working for you requires no small amount of courage. It means intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hope that a long-term risk will pay off. Routines and priorities get disrupted. Traditional ways of doing business get slowly marginalized and eroded—and start to lose money—as a new model takes over. That’s a big ask, in terms of a company’s culture and mindset. When you do it, you’re saying to people who for their entire careers have been compensated based on the success of their traditional business: “Don’t worry about that too much anymore. Worry about this instead.” But this isn’t profitable yet, and won’t be for a while. Deal with this kind of uncertainty by going back to basics: Lay out your strategic priorities clearly. Remain optimistic in the face of the unknown. And be accessible and fair-minded to people whose work lives are being thrown into disarray.

intentionally taking on short-term losses in the hope of generating long-term growth—requires no small amount of courage.

Mark Zuckerberg believes in innovation and he believes there can be no great innovation without great risk. So, in the early days of Facebook, he deployed a shocking motto: Move fast and break things. Did the CEO really want us to break things? I mean, he’s telling us to break things! A motto that shocking forces everyone to stop and think. When they think, they realize that if you move fast and innovate, you will break things. If you ask yourself, “Should I attempt this breakthrough? It will be awesome, but it may cause problems in the short term,” you have your answer. If you’d rather be right than innovative, you won’t fit in at Facebook.

I’ve long believed that to effectively manage it is not only a critical competency but a significant predictor of company performance,” he explains. “One of these days, I’d like to create a hedge fund that invests in companies, taking long positions on companies with great it organizations that help the business win, and short the companies where it lets everyone down. I think we’d make a killing. What better way is there to force the next generation of ceos to give a shit about it?

We are being asked to reduce the creativity and complexity of our ordinary lives to cultural slaughter; we are being bullied into understanding the vital exchange of passionately held views as a collapse of intelligence and civility; we are being asked to regard public education with hysteria and dismantle rather than protect it; we are being seduced into accepting truncated, short-term, CEO versions of our wholly human future. Our everyday lives may be laced with tragedy, glazed with frustration and want, but they are also capable of fierce resistance to the dehumanization and trivialization that politico-cultural punditry and profit-driven media depend upon.

What’s more, SolarCity is a key part of what can be thought of as the unified field theory of Musk. Each one of his businesses is interconnected in the short term and the long term. Tesla makes battery packs that SolarCity can then sell to end customers. SolarCity supplies Tesla’s charging stations with solar panels, helping Tesla to provide free recharging to its drivers. Newly minted Model S owners regularly opt to begin living the Musk Lifestyle and outfit their homes with solar panels. Tesla and SpaceX help each other as well. They exchange knowledge around materials, manufacturing techniques, and the intricacies of operating factories that build so much stuff from the ground up.

Mr. Cawley looked into Rob’s eyes and understood that the young man was saying this only because he was supposed to. He saw something more in those eyes: anger. The emotion wasn’t nakedly apparent, but Mr. Cawley was a professional at reading the subtleties of people. The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain human frailties could actually help fuel success. Insecurity drove billionaire entrepreneurs. Emotional instability made for superb art. The need for attention built great political leaders. But anger, in his experience, led only to inertia. He remembered when he’d offered to pay Rob’s tuition at this very event, in this very gymnasium—an offer he’d never made to any student before or since. As a financial master, Mr. Cawley looked at the world in terms of investments, of risk and reward. In 1998, the “investment” in Rob had struck him on paper as one of the lowest-risk and the highest-return; he saw no possible downside in giving this rare boy the slight push (Yale’s four-year tuition of $140,000 being slight for a bank CEO worth nine figures) he needed to reach the pinnacle for which he was already headed. Almost a decade later, as Rob broke off eye contact to gaze down at the floor as if there were a pit between them, Mr. Cawley understood that a life wasn’t lived on paper. He was not disappointed so much as confused, and he opted not to inquire further into what exactly had happened to Rob’s psyche between Yale graduation and now. He wanted to spare himself the sting of his own poor judgment. This conversation was the last he ever had with Rob.

My interviews also imparted a sense to the interviewees of how significant the new job was to the company. When the CEO and global HR leader each take an hour to talk to you about a job you’re interviewing for, that says something

As a CEO, you have to stand up to hard times. You cannot give up. You have to persevere. There are no short cuts.

them. The days are long, but the years are short.

Carmen Sandiego,

TikTok.

Aaron.

Getting to fifty-fifty is incredibly complex and nuanced, requiring many detailed solutions that will take decades to fully play out. To accelerate the process, change needs to start at the top. Like Stewart Butterfield, CEOs need to make hiring and retaining women an explicit priority. In addition, here is the bare minimum of what we can do at an individual and a systemic level: First of all, people, be nice to each other. Treat one another with respect and dignity, including those of the opposite sex.That should be pretty simple. Don’t enable assholes. Stop making excuses for bad behavior, or ignoring it. CEOs must embrace and champion the need to reach a fair representation of gender within their companies, and develop a comprehensive plan to get there. Be long-term focused, not short-term. It may take three weeks to find a white man for the job, but three months to find a woman. Those three months could save three years of playing catch-up in the future. Invest in not just diversity but inclusion. Even if your company is small, everything counts. And take the time to educate your employees about why this is important. Companies need to appoint more women to their boards. And boards need to hold company leadership to account to get to fifty-fifty in their employee ranks, starting with company executives. Venture capital firms need to hire more women partners, and limited partners should pressure them to do so and, at the very least, ask them what their plans around diversity are. Investors, both men and women, need to start funding more women and diverse teams, period. LPs need to fund more women VCs, who can establish new firms with new cultural norms. Stop funding partnerships that look and act the same. Most important, stop blaming everybody else for the problem or pretending that it is too hard for us to solve. It’s time to look in the mirror. This is an industry, after all, that prides itself on disruption and revolutionary new ways of thinking. Let’s put that spirit of innovation and embrace of radical change to good use. Seeing a more inclusive workforce in Silicon Valley will encourage more girls and women studying computer science now.

Do you ever read annual reports, paying particular attention to the CEO’s comments? No? That’s a pity, because there you’ll find countless examples of this next error, which we all fall for at one time or another. For example, if the company has enjoyed an excellent year, the CEO catalogues his indispensable contributions: his brilliant decisions, tireless efforts and cultivation of a dynamic corporate culture. However, if the company has had a miserable year, we read about all sorts of other dynamics: the unfortunate exchange rate, governmental interference, the malicious trade practices of the Chinese, various hidden tariffs, subdued consumer confidence and so on. In short: we attribute success to ourselves and failures to external factors. This is the self-serving bias.

The essayist and investor Paul Graham, a peer and rival of Peter Thiel’s, has charted the trajectory of a start-up, with all its ups and downs. After the initial bump of media attention, the rush of excitement from the unexpected success, Graham says that the founders enter a phase where the novelty begins to wear off, and they quickly descend from their early euphoria into what he calls the “trough of sorrow.” A start-up launches with its investments, gets a few press hits, and then smacks right into reality. Many companies never make it out of this ditch. “The problem with the Silicon Valley,” as Jim Barksdale, the former CEO and president of Netscape, once put it, “is that we tend to confuse a clear view with a short distance.” Here, too, like the founders of a start-up, the conspirators have smacked into reality. The reality of the legal system. The defensive bulwark of the First Amendment. The reality of the odds. They have discovered the difference between a good plan and how far they’ll need to travel to fulfill it. They have trouble even serving Denton with papers. Harder has to request a 120-day extension just to wrap his head around Gawker’s financial and corporate structure. This is going to be harder than they thought. It always is. To say that in 2013 all the rush and excitement present on those courthouse steps several months earlier had dissipated would be a preposterous understatement. If a conspiracy, by its inherent desperation and disadvantaged position, is that long struggle in a dark hallway, here is the point where one considers simply sitting down and sobbing in despair, not even sure what direction to go. Is this even possible? Are we wrong? Machiavelli wrote that fortune—misfortune in fact—aims herself where “dikes and dams have not been made to contain her.” Clausewitz said that battle plans were great but ultimately subject to “friction”—delays, confusion, mistakes, and complications. What is friction? Friction is when you’re Pericles and you lay out a brilliant plan to defend Athens against Sparta and then your city is hit by the plague.

Tim Cook, now Apple’s CEO, says that he worried about Tevanian leaving, and urged Steve in 2004 to figure out another challenge to keep the brilliant software engineer at Apple. “Steve looked at me,” Cook remembers, “and goes, ‘I agree he’s really smart. But he’s decided he doesn’t want to work. I’ve never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn’t want to work hard to work hard.’ ” Another time, shortly after Steve had learned that Tevanian had taken up golf, Steve carped to Cook that something was really amiss. “Golf?!” he thundered incredulously. “Who has time for golf?

One of my top priorities as CEO was to eradicate the BS and reinvent planning. Every year, starting in 2003, I required teams presenting to me to write a three-to-four-page executive summary that highlighted the basic plan. That document would allow us to cut through the pages of obfuscating charts and bullet points.

My first and most enduring challenge as CEO was to dramatically improve the quality of both our individual thinking and our group discussions.

In 2006, we created a special restricted stock units (RSUs) award program for about sixty of our key lower-level executives. We would select these sixty people each year to receive awards representing between 50 and 120 percent of their respective salaries. Once a leader received this award, he or she couldn’t receive it again for three years, allowing us to touch almost two hundred high-potential, lower-level leaders during that period. Each August I called every recipient to discuss the reward, what they had done to merit it, and what the award represented. That took a fair amount of time, but it was worth it. When these up-and-coming leaders received a call from me, they sometimes thought it was a practical joke. In an organization of over 100,000 people, why was the CEO calling them? Personalizing the award left a positive impression, contributing to the significantly higher retention rates we saw among these executives as compared with the rest of their cohort.

Joseph L. Bower’s The CEO Within, which argued for choosing leaders inside the company to serve as CEO. According to Bower, you wanted a special kind of insider: someone who intimately understood the company and its operations, but who could also maintain a sense of distance and understand what about the company needed to change—an outsider’s perspective from someone on the inside.

We decided to boil our list down to just a few key criteria around which we could easily evaluate candidates. We settled on six: •​An intense desire to win: We didn’t want a new CEO who was adept at explaining why something didn’t happen, but rather someone who could figure out how to win even if unanticipated problems cropped up. •​Intelligence: We wanted someone smart and analytical who could avoid problems before they arose. •​The ability to think independently: Fad surfers need not apply. •​Courage: My successor had to be capable of making bold decisions, while also checking afterward to verify that these decisions were correct. •​Curiosity: We needed a CEO who could stay fresh over time by exposing him or herself to novel ideas—someone who was self-aware and dedicated to learning. •​An ability to motivate and build a strong culture: Our next CEO had to be able to mobilize the company behind the strategy, hiring great people and motivating them.

Unless consumers had the ability to consume our content in more user-friendly, more mobile, and more digital ways, our relevance would be challenged. In short, we needed to view technology as more of an opportunity than a threat, and we had to do so with commitment, enthusiasm, and a sense of urgency.

SolarCity is a key part of what can be thought of as the unified field theory of Musk. Each one of his businesses is interconnected in the short term and the long term. Tesla makes battery packs that SolarCity can then sell to end customers. SolarCity supplies Tesla’s charging stations with solar panels, helping Tesla to provide free recharging to its drivers. Newly minted Model S owners regularly opt to begin living the Musk Lifestyle and outfit their homes with solar panels. Tesla and SpaceX help each other as well. They exchange knowledge around materials, manufacturing techniques, and the intricacies of operating factories that build so much stuff from the ground up.

once gave him a tour of a hotel in Orlando called “Art of Animation.” It’s a huge hotel, three thousand rooms, priced more affordably than many of our hotels. I was proud of its quality for the price, and when Steve came down for a board retreat shortly after it opened, I took him to see it. We walked into the hotel, and Steve looked around and proclaimed, “This is crap. You’re not faking anybody.” “Steve,” I said, “this is for people who want to come to Disney World with their kids and can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars a night on a room. It’s ninety bucks, and it’s a decent, nice, clean, pleasant place.” “I don’t get it,” he barked. Most people would have appreciated the quality and the care we’d taken to design it, but Steve wasn’t most people. He was looking at it through his own lens. “It’s not for you,” I said. “I’m sorry that I showed it to you.” I was a little mad at his snobbery, but I also knew that was just who he was. He built things of the highest quality, not necessarily affordable to all, but he never sacrificed quality in order to attain affordability. I never showed him anything like that again.

In any negotiation, be clear about where you stand from the beginning. There’s no short-term gain that’s worth the long-term erosion of trust that occurs when you go back on the expectation you created early on.