[LINK] What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology

post by David_Gerard · 2011-04-02T10:22:27.886Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 0 comments

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The general application to life - ultimately, you are the person responsible for turning the crank that makes your world go round - is obvious. His methods to deal with it will ring true with LW readers.

By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.

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This means that you will face a broad set of things that you don’t know how to do that require skills that you don’t have. Nevertheless, everybody will expect you to know how to do them, because, well, you are the CEO.

Ben Horowitz. "What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology." Ben's Blog, 2001-04-01.

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