Ben Horowitz Quotes

I think that business book reporting, it's all Jim Collins, it's the story of victory; it's success bias over and over again.

'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.

We approached Yahoo and Jerry Yang and said that Hadoop is going to continue to be popular, and as it does, more and more of your team is going to get poached by other companies and come under pressure to leave. This way, you can control your own fate and destiny.

Eighty percent of the cases used in the typical MBA program are about successful companies. Students graduate with this notion that 'If I do everything that the people in those cases did, then my organization will grow and be successful, too.'

As the leadership team, we're taking bold and decisive action to evolve our organization and culture. This includes difficult steps, but they are necessary to position Microsoft for future growth and industry leadership.

Basically if you study entrepreneurs, there is a misnomer: People think that entrepreneurs take risk, and they get rewarded because they take risk. In reality entrepreneurs do everything they can to minimize risk. They are not interested in taking risk. They want free lunches and they go after free lunches.

I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same - they give the exact same advice. It's like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.

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

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

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.

I've spent a lot of time studying corporations and what makes them tick.

Too many executives I've met over the years have the mentality of a bodybuilder; they've come to accept the idea that growth is synonymous with success.

At the end of the day, you want to do what's best for your organization, present and future.

For us as a firm, not only from a risk mitigation standpoint but also as a point of differentiation, it is incredibly important to get consistency and the very best individuals with the capabilities to do the very best job.

Leadership changes, and evolving marketplace conditions can significantly impact business strategy.

I am the CEO of HCL Corporation, and, of course, a large part of my time does get spent in HCL Corporation, whether it is in actively managing our investments or perhaps even the governance and accountability and really seeing the strategic direction forward for HCL Corporation.

I love Gateway, and I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure the company can grow and prosper in this challenging environment.

When employees join executives in truly owning the responsibility for business success, an exciting new sense of teamwork takes hold.

My experience in decision-making has shown that patterns are tough to break. In the military, we study an opponent, looking for gaps, flaws, or weaknesses that can be exploited. Successful leaders at all levels in all disciplines conduct this kind of analysis.

Leaders of companies of any size, at any stage of development spend a lot of time focused on growing the business. We develop our game plan and ensure that we are optimally executing on our objectives. We concentrate on looking forward.

We try to study our rivals so we know where to improve.

Innovation is critical to the heartbeat of any successful corporation in the industrialized world.

Some corporations are extremely well managed; some nonprofit organizations are. It has nothing to do with the sector. It has to do with quality of management.

You want to put yourself in the best position to try and win.

I've really thought a lot about why other companies fail or succeed. I had to be a student of failure and find out why things went off the rails. I did that at a fairly deep level, and it's still something I do.