Lemon #49. Take care of the people, the products, and the profits
While reading ‘The hard thing about hard things’ from Ben Horowitz, we learned about how to take care of people:
In enterprise software companies, the two most important positions tend to be VP of sales and VP of engineering.
My old boss Jim Barksdale was fond of saying, «We take care of the people, the products, and the profits – in that order. It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. «Taking care of the people» is the most difficult of the three by far and if don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work. As organizations grow large, important work can go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and bureaucratic processes can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy.
If your company is a good place to work, you too may live long enough to find your glory.
In bad companies, when the economics disappear, so do the employees. In technology companies, when the employees disappear, the spiral begins: The company declines in value, the best employee leave, the company declines in value, the best employees leave and so on… Spirals are extremely difficult to reverse.
Ben Horowitz @ The hard thing about hard things.
Jorge Moreno
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