Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO

Key ideas

Horowitz argues peacetime and wartime demand radically different management, and that a CEO who masters both knows when to follow the rules and when to break them.

1. 1

   What peace and war mean for a company

   Horowitz defines peacetime as holding a large lead in a growing core market, and wartime as fending off an imminent threat to the company's existence. He says the threat can come from competitors, macroeconomic shifts, market change or supply chains.

2. 2

   Different situations call for different goals

   In peace, Horowitz says, leaders widen the opportunity and encourage creativity across many objectives, as with Google's 20% time. In war, survival depends on everyone following one mission, as he says Steve Jobs required when he returned to an Apple weeks from bankruptcy.

3. 3

   War breaks the usual management rules

   Horowitz's side-by-side comparison has the wartime CEO violating protocol, caring about tiny details that touch the main goal, building the HR capacity for layoffs and refusing consensus-building. He offers Andy Grove publicly rebuking a late employee as behavior most management books would advise against.

4. 4

   Most management books teach only peacetime

   Horowitz says management books are mostly written by consultants who study successful companies at peace, so they describe peacetime methods. Apart from Andy Grove's books, he says he knows of none that teach wartime management.

5. 5

   One CEO can do both, with difficulty

   Horowitz believes a CEO can learn both skill sets but says it is hard. By his own account he spent about nine months as a peacetime CEO and seven years as a wartime one, and he says one could easily argue he failed at the first and succeeded at the second.

In Ben’s words

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