What You Can Learn from Ben Horowitz - The Hard Thing About Hard Things

I had this one on my list, but till a personal reco from Tony Hansmann, it didn't get on my phone. Within a few hours of that encounter, it did. And it displaced "Magic Words" by Jonah Berger - which is not a bad read, I should add. You should definitely check it out.

This is a WIP, but I should say right away that, upon hearing it, I was immediately obsessed with getting hold of Mark Cranney's sales training manual. If you have any ideas on how, please comment.

In this podcast, Mark is asked what his thought were on what Ben wrote about him in HTAHT (there were positive references, but one person also wanted to give a negative reference - agreed that Mark was effective, but would be a terrible cultural fit. What? Why? Let me give you a story - he showed up at a company's sales training event and said "I don't care how well you've been trained. If you're not bringing in at least 500k a year in sales, I'm putting a bullet in your head"). Then, during the interview, Ben asked Mark how we would train someone and Mark had a really pained expression ("it was like asking Einstein to explain the laws of physics") and an uncomfortable five-minute silence ensued. "It would take longer than we have time for". He reached into his bag and pulled out a massive sales training manual he had put together. FYI, podcast host is Ian Faison, who went to West Point and now runs Caspian Studios - helping companies with their podcast growth and distribution.

He left out my perspective (what I thought of them) and he corrects that in the next book ("What You Do is Who You Are"). 

In any type of recruiting situation it's a two-way street and you've got to be there's got to be a fit both ways and I don't want to give away the punchline but I think Ben's gonna rectify that in his book that's released this fall.

If you read Ben's book they were learning on the fly, so they didn't really have a real deep set of criteria hiring criteria. I think Ben had been through four or five of my predecessors. (FYI, Ben says all this about Mark to make the point that you should hire for strengths rather than lack of weaknesses)

The thing he left out of the book was, I wasn't looking to come out west. I wasn't looking to join them. I really wasn't looking, you know, their culture was not a fit for me either, at all. In fact, the recruiter called me multiple times, and I told him "No" multiple times. That's the piece he kind of left out, was I said no. They called it Oopsware. His competition was, you know, who I knew his competition. It was a company called Bladelogic that I'd worked with. You know, the guys running that company were three to four years ahead of him on the product and go-to-market. I knew they were getting killed. And I finally, I was getting on a plane to come out here and agreed, literally, in the airport, to say, 'Look, I'll go see Ben and Mark, right? I wouldn't mind meeting them, but there's no way I'm gonna take this job because it's just, it's not a right fit. It's probably not the culture fit. It's, you know, that is just not gonna be for me. So, Frankie, it was the connection with Ben and I that kind of put us over the hump, so on my side anyway. 

More to come..