Ben Horowitz: Quit being a coward and do the hard thing | Big Think+

"You need to run towards the pain and darkness and not away from it. I think the best leaders always run towards the darkness. They always run towards a problem."

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Much of the management advice we find in books emphasizes using leadership tactics that may seem reasonably obvious. This advice is often easy to follow — but that’s not where leaders run into issues with their strategy, argues Ben Horowitz, founding partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and author of the best-selling book, "The Hard Thing About Hard Things.”

Horowitz says that leaders make blunders when they find themselves in highly emotionally charged situations where the emotion prevents them from doing the thing that they intellectually know they need to do. For example, firing a friend or doing a reorganization that causes a very talented employee to lose power. These things are much more difficult, and people often avoid them. But as a leader, you're much better off running at your fear than running away from your fear because it's going to chase you down, emphasizes Horowitz.

‘Management debt’ is what happens when you don't do what you're supposed to. And accruing a lot of management debt has a cascading effect that can create a total degradation of your organization. Here’s how to lead instead.

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About Ben Horowitz:

Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are. He also created the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect the greatest cultural leaders to the best new technology companies, and enable more young African Americans to enter the technology industry.

Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007, and was appointed vice president and general manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software at HP. Earlier, he was vice president and general manager of America Online’s E-commerce Platform division, where he oversaw development of the company’s flagship Shop@AOL service. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications. He also served as vice president of Netscape’s widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line. Before joining Netscape in July 1995, he held various senior product marketing positions at Lotus Development Corporation.

Ben has an MS and a BA in computer science from UCLA and Columbia University, respectively.

Ben serves on the board of Anyscale, Databricks, Mayvenn, NationBuilder, Navan, Okta ($OKTA), and UnitedMasters.