Every IT specialist dreams of moving up the career ladder. Writing code, designing websites, making high-quality applications are all exciting and interesting, but they need to think about higher positions to develop and increase their income. Most often, those are leadership positions that allow you to manage a group of employees and properly organize the work of the institution to increase its efficiency. Ben Horowitz wrote his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, especially for people who want to choose this path in life.
What is This Book About
Ben Horowitz is the head of a large company who has overcome many difficulties in his work and found ways to prevent business crises. He talentedly managed his subordinates, helped them find a foothold for more productive work, and correctly organized the workflow, which allowed him to increase the company’s profit. In his book, Ben talks about all the problems and gives advice on how to solve them. The book is intended for people in IT leadership positions, but will also be useful to all people interested in this topic, as well as in leadership, overcoming difficulties, motivation for more effective work.
Here is a list of the main topics that the author of the book raises:
- Attracting investment. The most important part of any manager’s job is to find the money for the organization to finance new ideas and pay decent salaries to qualified specialists. Throughout the book, the author touches on the problems of finding investors, presenting the company, negotiating, and avoiding difficult issues.
- How to deal with collapse. Many IT companies face enormous competition and sometimes go bankrupt. It is a real disaster for the owners and managers of companies, as their hopes and aspirations are not fulfilled, and the invested time does not pay off. How not to break down and keep moving forward, how to find the motivation to try again? Ben goes into detail on that too.
- The moral environment in the company. Modern companies are well aware that working with unhappy, depressed employees with small salaries is hard, unpleasant, and very unreliable. That is why good companies try to create conditions where everyone, especially newcomers and young people, would feel great and not humiliated or worthless. Ben Horowitz teaches how to build relationships in a company in such a way that everyone is comfortable there.
- Staff training. Many managers believe that they are only required to manage, but the book perfectly explains why this is not so. Professionals should be engaged in the education of employees, be a role model for them, and properly motivate them, making them want to improve and become better.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a book that will open the eyes of novice managers to many things that seem completely irrelevant or unfamiliar to them. Ben Horowitz personally faced a lot of problems while managing personnel and IT company, made a lot of useful conclusions, and as a result, was able to achieve great heights in his career.
The book will be very useful to everyone who is interested in IT management and wants to become an excellent leader for active young people in the future. It will also be good for anyone interested in management.
