At around 50 employees, you get to the point where you can't see what's going on all the time. So you start to have weekly check-ins, and you have days that go by without knowing exactly what's going on.
Running a company is pretty demanding.
You can't grow long-term if you can't eat short-term. Anybody can manage short. Anybody can manage long. Balancing those two things is what management is.
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.
Good businesses can survive a little bad management.
I think that every manager who starts work with a team has the best expectations and is giving all he's got to improve immediately.
Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.
Everyone wants to be loved and liked - but you can't be as a manager.
Reports tell you what your subordinates want you to know.
The toughest thing about managing is knowing your personnel and what it can give you under all conditions.
There's this joy that comes from sitting down to solve a problem and standing up when it's done and good. Building a company or managing people is never just done.
Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the worst.
[Facebook and Twitter] aren't the real problems in the office. The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings.
I've never seen myself as a manager. As a manager, you have to put all your time into the job, and that would be difficult for me.
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.
Managing is a tough job. When you're young, you just think it's a natural progression - I'm good at this, so I'm going to be good at that - and it's not that way at all.
My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.
Every manager must be prepared to face every situation.
There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.
Many of the railroad evils were inherent in the situation; they were explained by the fact that both managers and public were dealing with a new agency whose laws they did not completely understand.
There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.
I'm going from doing all of the work to having to delegate the work - which is almost harder for me than doing the work myself. I'm a lousy delegator, but I'm learning.
The optimum committee has no members.
The most important figures for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable.
Any time you employ thousands of people, some people do dumb things.
