Ben Horowitz Quotes

As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better. They get reviewed, and thoughtful people look at decision.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

There's smarter people than me. But you cannot have any one guy running 18 billion-dollar businesses. It just doesn't make sense to me. I've met some extraordinary leaders in my time. They struggle with running one billion-dollar business.

We are ready to say that we rule the entire Elgin enterprise as irrelevant to the present.

I was always fascinated by the decision-making process and the managerial process and just business in general.

The way you continue to be a successful business is you don't wait for the car to go off the cliff. You have to manage yourself. And make sure you do it in the right way so you are not making decisions in crisis.

Business reporting is not dealing with objects, it is dealing with relationships between objects.

If the staff lacks policy guidance against which to test decisions, their decisions will be random.

In every business, in every industry, management does matter.

The thorniest business problems will surface at the board meetings, and the different, sharp opinions help to better explore the poles of the arguments to make better decisions.

[Describing her role:] It's like running a big corporation and a little country at the same time.

There's certain circumstances, there's certain situations, there's certain decisions that have to be made based upon the business and you can't take that personal.

The biggest challenge is adding the bureaucracy it takes to run the company without becoming fat, lazy, inflexible - bureaucratic.

You can't make good decisions without knowing the business.

As a company grows, things get stuck at the top. It can be a bottleneck.

In business, there's a constant focus on developing strategies, reviewing executive performance against those strategies each year, engaging with opposing or different points of view, and having intellectual dialogue.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

As the CEO, I have to take care of the short term, mid term and the long term.

A bigger business is like a cruise ship: There are lots of amenities and you can go a lot further, but it's harder to turn quickly.

What I learned from Rockefeller that's off-the-hook important is: You need to know exactly where you stand in a business at all times. Measure everything, because everything that is measured and watched improves.

Management manages by making decisions and by seeing that those decisions are implemented.

Clearly, as a CEO, you have other functions that are managed by other people.

In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren't management books out there that could help me.

Obviously I've got a great team of people within the company. You can't operate all by yourself. We have a good board of directors and a big bench, and they can make decisions if I'm not around.