Table of Contents
Introduction ix
Chapter 1 From Communist to Venture Capitalist 1
Chapter 2 "I Will Survive" 17
Chapter 3 This Time with Feeling 39
Chapter 4 When Things Fall Apart 57
The Struggle 60
CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is 64
The Right Way to Lay People Off 68
Preparing to Fire an Executive 73
Demoting a Loyal Friend 81
Lies That Losers Tell 85
Lead Bullets 88
Nobody Cares 91
Chapter 5 Take Care of the People, the Products, and the Profits-In that Order 93
A Good Place to Work 99
Why Startups Should Train Their People 105
Is It Okay to Hire People from Your Friend's Company? 114
Why It's. Hard to Bring Big Company Execs into Little Companies 119
Hiring Executives: If You've Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good? 124
When Employees Misinterpret Managers 130
Management Debt 134
Management Quality Assurance 139
Chapter 6 Concerning the Going Concern 143
How to Minimize Politics in Your Company 147
The Right Kind of Ambition 155
Titles and Promotions 159
When Smart People Are Bad Employees 165
Old People 170
One-on-One 176
Programming Your Culture 179
Taking the Mystery Out of Scaling a Company 185
The Scale Anticipation Fallacy 193
Chapter 7 How to Lead Even When You Don't Know Where You are Going 197
The Most Difficult CEO Skill 201
The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage 209
Ones and Twos 214
Follow the Leader 219
Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO 224
Making Yourself a CEO 229
How to Evaluate CEOs 235
Chapter 8 First Rule of Entrepreneurship: There are No Rules 243
Solving the Accountability vs. Creativity Paradox 248
The Freaky Friday Management Technique 252
Staying Great 254
Should You Sell Your Company? 257
Chapter 9 The End of the Beginning 265
Appendix: Questions for Head of Enterprise Sales Force 277
Acknowledgments 283
Credits 287
