Thrive or Survive, or why Peace and War are overrated metaphors for leadership

Ben Horowitz made the ideas of ‘peacetime’ and ‘wartime’ CEOs famous in his blog post Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO, and his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

The idea that you need to behave differently in different situations makes sense. The military metaphors are compelling, but kind of icky?

Here are some of his suggestions on how to be a good wartime CEO:

Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone.

Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully.

Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture.

I have no doubt that in order to run a huge enterprise and have it not fail, you need to make some difficult decisions as you navigate through the ‘hard times’. But I think leaders at many smaller companies read this advice and use it as an excuse for just being a horrible person. “Oh, we’re in war time, so I need to be an asshole right now. It’s good leadership”.

Thrive mode and survive mode

Maybe it’s useful to frame the two ‘modes’ as thrive or survive rather than peace or war. Many businesses fail. If a business is facing existential risks, then you won’t have the luxury of focusing on expansion, doing non-essential but nice things for your team, or allowing the inefficiencies of democratic decision making. In order to survive, you need sometimes need to make hard decisions and not everyone will be happy with the ones you make, so you need to be OK with that.

But you don’t have to be an asshole about it.

If you’re in survival mode, the first thing you probably want to do is tell your people ‘hey, we’re in survival mode right now. If we don’t make these changes, we will probably not be in business in the next x months. Sorry.’ Hopefully you still have time to listen to input and ideas, even as you switch to ‘Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive’ mode.

The terms Thrive mode (for peace) and Survive mode (for war) might not make that much difference on their own, but I think metaphors matter. I read some research back in the day that metaphors can change the decisions people make. For example, some research suggests that if you talk about crime as a ‘virus’ rather than as a ‘beast’, then people are more likely to look for root-cause fixes.

When crime was framed as a virus, participants were more likely to suggest social reform. Alternatively, when crime was framed as a beast, participants were more likely to suggest law enforcement and punishment. 1.

Thinking of hard times as survival mode instead of war mode might similarly help people make better decisions than the ‘wartime’ framing. If you’re fighting for survival, you still want to be friendly to your team. Maybe it’s even more important than during peace time to avoid internal conflicts that can escalate and distract you from the task at hand. It’s still possible to collaborate with others (who are likely also fighting with survival), rather than going into all-out conflict mode and seeing everything as zero-sum.

Survival mode CEOs

Survival mode CEOs probably take some leaves out of the wartime CEO playbook, but not all of them. They cut down unnecessary objectives, and remove initiatives like Google’s 20% time that are likely to hurt the company in a majority of cases for a moonshot chance of winning something big. Survival mode CEOs are probably less popular with their staff than Thrive mode CEOs, but they are not disliked.

Survival mode CEOs are more hands-on. In the tradeoffs of doing something more efficiently now versus letting it be a learning experience for your team for the future, the future is not guaranteed, so the expected payoff is smaller.

Survival mode CEOs set fewer and clearer goals. If any survival projects fail, the negative payoff is higher than if thrive-mode projects fail, so running fewer initiatives and watching them more closely makes sense.

Survival mode CEOs have more plan Bs. It’s more likely that plan As will not work out, so the expected payoff of developing backup plans is higher. This is in contrast to Ben’s advice of ‘Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six.’. While it sounds good, it reeks of survivorship bias.

Survival mode CEOs are more objective. While being an asshole is usually counter-productive, some aspects of making a workplace a fluffy, padded, positive, happy place to hang out are luxuries that the survival-mode CEO can’t afford.

Survival mode CEOs become obsessed with efficiency over effectiveness. While effectively executing on new objectives, even if that requires some waste, is a good strategy to thrive, in tough times there is no room for wasted resources.

Overall, I don’t believe that it’s too difficult to be good at both ‘thrive’ and ‘survive’ styles of leadership. All of the core things that make a good leader are the same. Some people might enjoy the thrill of ‘survive’ mode more, while others might quit in the face of it, but if you’re committed to making something work and doing what is needed at any given moment there’s really no reason why you can’t be equally effective in either mode.