Ben Horowitz Quotes

'In Search of Excellence' was an afterthought, the runt of the McKinsey consulting litter, a hip-pocket project that was never supposed to amount to much.

Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.

The result of the collaborative culture is that corporations or government institutions focus intensely on internal culture and pour their energy into achieving minuscule policy changes relating to workplace efficiency, gender or race.

What is clear is that business leaders must commit to champion change - to be transparent about their goals for change, to align their incentives systems to drive the change, and to make sure their work environments are flexible in a way that allows men and women who choose to work to be able to achieve all of their potential.

CEOs resign when the internal dynamics of the company and the external dynamics of the company actually come together to say it is appropriate. When the internal dynamics ask you whether you have a replacement. I think the transition from CEOships have also become cartoonish.

We want to move along and make sure, both internally and externally, that people realize how the company is being run, and it's being run by a group of people now, not just me.

The thing is, continuity of strategic direction and continuous improvement in how you do things are absolutely consistent with each other. In fact, they're mutually reinforcing.

I think there are certain business matters which we must now conduct differently than we used to.

Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.

My mission is to become part of Time Inc. and push the business forward.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

I am who I am, and I'm focused on that, and being a great CEO of Apple.

Let's form proactive synergy restructuring teams.

The best way to make change is to know how something works. If you're going to go build something or change whatever it is, if you don't know how it works and you're trying to go make a change in it, the first thing you're doing is you're spending time figuring out how it works. The same thing happens in organizations.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up.

If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization.

Your time as a manager is finite and valuable.

If the culture you have is radically different from an 'experiment and take-risk' culture, then you have a big change you going to have to make - and no little gimmicks are going to do it for you.

When I went into GM there was a lack of morale. The company had gone bankrupt and the people who worked there were embarrassed. Underneath all of, though, there was a will to show what they were capable of, but nobody knew exactly what to do.

Keeping people fired up starts with having a really clear vision for what the company is aiming to do.

Everyone has an idea over time of what the business should be, and during the formative period, too many opinions could be disruptive.

For me, if I knew that I wanted to be a CEO and I set that final destination right up front, that helped me develop a career track.

If it's one thing we do really well as a company, it's that we take big change slowly and deliberately and bring the community along with us.