My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive.

Horowitz realized his error when his brother-in-law, an AT&T pole repairman, described a visiting senior executive: "Yeah, I know Fred. He comes by about once a quarter to blow a little sunshine up my ass." At that moment he knew he'd been screwing up his company by being too positive.

A brain, no matter how big, cannot solve a problem that it doesn't know about. It's a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.

A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: bad news travels fast, good news travels slow. If you investigate companies which have failed, you will find many employees who knew about the fatal issues long before those issues killed the company.

Beware of management maxims that stop information from flowing freely, like "don't bring me a problem without bringing me a solution." What if the employee cannot solve an important problem — do you really want him to bury that information?

Nobody took bad news harder than me. Engineers easily brushed off things that kept me awake all night. If things went horribly wrong, they could walk away, but I could not.

Why the young-CEO instinct to absorb all the worry and project sunshine gets it exactly backwards.