📅 The Weekly Edge

— On Doing Hard Things With Full Commitment

Rule: If you are going to eat shit, don’t nibble.

Source: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Some of the most important decisions in business are not complicated. They are simply hard.

Ben Horowitz wrote the most honest book about being a CEO that I’ve encountered. He didn’t write about the frameworks and the frameworks and the playbooks. He wrote about the decisions that have no good options, the moments when there is no right answer — only less wrong ones.

His advice about difficult decisions is blunt: when you’ve determined that something difficult must be done, do it fully and do it quickly. A layoff that drags out over months costs more — in morale, in productivity, in trust — than one that is done swiftly and with dignity. A strategic pivot that is communicated in hedged, partial language creates more confusion than the clear statement of what has changed and why.

The instinct to soften, delay, and hedge difficult decisions is understandable. It comes from a real desire to protect people from pain. But in most cases, the delay makes the pain worse, not better.

Half measures in business are expensive. They extend the uncertainty. They signal ambivalence. They prevent the organization from moving forward because the decision has not actually been made.

This principle at The Executives’ Institute is the most direct one we carry: If you’re going to eat it, don’t nibble. Commit fully to the hard decision, execute it cleanly, and move forward.

The hardest things in business rarely get easier with time.