At Netscape, Bill Turpin shut down Ben's pivot plan with: "Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that's going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets."

The origin of the lead bullets lesson, from Netscape's fight against Microsoft IIS.

When Opsware was losing deals to Bladelogic, Ben's team pitched every escape hatch: build a lightweight version, acquire a simpler architecture, focus on service providers. His answer: the customers were buying, they just weren't buying our product — this was not a market problem, so it was not a time to pivot. The only option was to build a better product.

"We had to go through the front door and deal with the big, ugly guy blocking it." Nine months of a brutal product cycle later, Opsware regained its lead and eventually sold for $1.6B — roughly 10x what Ben estimates it would have been worth had they dodged the fight.

Watch out for the pitch pattern: "We have the best product, customers love it — but competitor X has 5x our revenue because we go through partners/OEMs since we can't build a direct channel." That's silver-bullet thinking. If you have the better product, knuckle up and go to war.

Existential threats are so terrifying that smart people inside the company will generate an endless supply of clever alternatives — anything to avoid living or dying in a single battle. The CEO's job is to recognize when those alternatives are avoidance dressed up as strategy.