Ben Horowitz's latest blog post, on The Struggle, is a gem. It's a healthier, stronger take than some things I've read recently that say "being a CEO is awful", and a more mature, realistic take than "being a CEO is tons of fun".

An article in the Harvard Business Review gives some great examples of how product quality requires ruthless honesty

One day in February 1966 [Bob] Taylor knocked at the office of ARPA’s director, the Austrian-born physicist Charles Herzfeld, armed with little more than this vague notion of a digital web connecting bands of time-sharers around the country. At any other agency he would have been expected to produce reams of documentation rationalizing the program and projecting its costs out to the next millennium; not ARPA. “I had no formal proposals for the ARPANET,” he recounted later. “I just decided that we were going to build a network that would connect these interactive communities into a larger community in such a way that a user of one community could connect to a distant community as though that user were on his own local system.”

An interview Hunter Walk did with Stewart Bonn about his time at Electronic Arts contains some tactics for experimenting and still delivering at high quality.

Regulation is often the enemy of the entrepreneur. It can be used by incumbents as a weapon to protect themselves from new competitors, or it can prevent consumers from taking prudent risks on new products and services. Which is why I’m fascinated by stories of entrepreneurs fighting regulation and winning.