Ben Horowitz Quotes

I can't tell you how many thousands of small moments that I've had with employees in our company that have been nothing more than a one-on-one. I'll see the baggage-services person, he or she is by himself. I'll pull them off to the side and have a 15-minute conversation about their history, their life, that kind of thing.

Start with good people, lay out the rules, communicate with your employees, motivate them and reward them. If you do all those things effectively, you can't miss.

We would rather have our employees running our business.

As a CEO, you get sucked into dealing with all the tasks of being a CEO. There's a big meeting, a big discussion, and you get into all the big issues, which is your job. But what CEOs often lose sight of is that it's all about the people who work for you. For every 1,000 decisions, 999 were being made when I was not in the room.

Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.

We treat the management-to-workforce relationship as very important and will continue to invest in that relationship.

Bottom line: If you can't spare some time to give your employees the chance to wow you, you'll never get the best from them.

Most CEOs walk around the office like we own the place, without realizing that the place itself isn't worth owning: a business's value comes from the people who walk out the door every night, who have to decide each morning whether to walk back in. One of the simplest things you can do as a leader is honor their choice and appreciate their work.

You can employ men and hire hands to work for you, but you must win their hearts to have them work with you.

If you believe, as I do, that your employees truly are your most valuable asset, you will do whatever you can to help them do their jobs as well as possible.

Just the act of listening means more than you can imagine to most employees.

You are only as successful as the people who work for you want you to be.

Every employee needs to know that there's somebody out there that they serve. And when we don't let people know that for one reason or another, we're depriving them of a fulfilling job.

When leaders throughout an organization take an active, genuine interest in the people they manage, when they invest real time to understand employees at a fundamental level, they create a climate for greater morale, loyalty, and, yes, growth.

When employees feel anonymous in the eyes of their managers, they simply cannot love their work, no matter how much money they make or how wonderful their jobs seem to be.

The most valuable lesson I learned in dealing with the ups and downs was to invest in my employees - to do all I could for them when the times were good.

The supermarket chain Whole Foods has quite a radical employee empowerment program, where employees get to decide whether another employee can work in their team or not. If they think this person's a slacker, doesn't have good ideas, they can vote and say, no, we don't want this person to be working with us on the vegetable aisle.

What you can't buy is the loyalty that comes through our dedicated crewmembers.

Take time to appreciate employees and they will reciprocate in a thousand ways.

On a personal level, I send out about 20 thank-you notes a day to staffers, on all levels. And every six weeks I have lunch with a group of a dozen or so employees, to get their perspective on the business, to address problems and to get feedback.

Just about anyone can make a good product, but it's the people that count. In the end, it's the employees who will take it from a kitchen-table idea to the next level. There are a lot of important things in business, but the people portion comes first.

Internal marketing is probably much more important than external marketing. That's even more true today than it's ever been.

We let folks know we're interested in them and that they're vital to us. cause they are.

The key to good management is keeping the guys on your team who hate your guts away from the guys who haven't made up their minds.

Most people in an organization try very hard to do what the leadership wants them to do. That places a tremendous responsibility on leaders.