BookYol

Concept

Nobody cares

Nobody cares is a line Horowitz borrows from Al Davis, the Oakland Raiders owner: when things go wrong, the press, the board and the employees do not care why, so stop looking for excuses or rescue and play the hand you were dealt.

The phrase sounds cruel, and Horowitz presents it as perhaps the best advice a CEO can get. He tells the story of the football coach Bill Parcells, short of many of his best players, asking Al Davis what he should do; Davis answered that nobody cares, just coach your team. For a CEO it means that all the reasons it is not your fault, all the market conditions, all the bad luck are irrelevant to the people who depend on you, and the only thing that matters is what you are going to do about it. The advice cuts two ways. It removes the comfort of explanation, which founders reach for as the situation worsens. And it removes the fantasy of rescue: the investor, the acquirer or the hire who will arrive and solve it. Horowitz pairs it with a second idea: there are no silver bullets, only lead bullets. The dramatic single fix almost never exists; what exists is a list of unglamorous, difficult things, and the founder's job is to work through them in order.

A real-life example

When a currency shock doubled the cost of the imported parts for his e-bike startup in Bursa, the founder spent his next board meeting walking through exchange-rate charts. A board member let him finish and asked what he was going to do. At the following meeting he brought a lead-bullet list instead: two local suppliers to qualify, a price rise to announce, one model to discontinue. Working through it took six weeks; the charts had taken a month and changed nothing.

How to use it

  1. 1When you catch yourself explaining why it is not your fault, stop; the explanation is true and useless. Ask instead what you will do.
  2. 2Stop waiting for the silver bullet; write the list of lead bullets, the unglamorous fixes and calls, and work through them in order.
  3. 3Report to the people who depend on you what you are doing, not why it happened.