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It's quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future.

Ben Horowitz

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Ben Horowitz
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: June 13
Businessman
Businessperson
Engineer
London
England
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz
Quite
Possible
Goal
Future
Ignoring
Quarter
Executive
Quarters
Executives

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Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.
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The right thing to do is to thank them for their work, let people know that they're moving on, and ... you don't really have to explain all their personal details. It's more important to leave them with their dignity... and let them go on to live another day. Remember, what you say at that meeting, that's their reputation.
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Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.
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The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.
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Leadership is hard to train on.
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Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
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Don't punk out and don't quit.
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In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.
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In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.
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A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.
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The person they're working with, is going to be the person they'll know more. So if that person leaves, they're going to go - well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.
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To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.
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It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.
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