Imagine this: You're running product at a company that's doing fine. Not great, but fine. Normal startup challenges. Normal pace.
Then the market shifts. Funding dries up. Your biggest competitor raises a massive round while you're suddenly struggling to make payroll. Everything changes overnight.
"We need you to help turn this around," leadership says. "Whatever it takes."
No new title. No new comp. Just new reality: You're now responsible for decisions you never signed up to make. Cut products. Cut people. Cut everything that isn't essential for survival.
That's how wartime CEOs are actually born. Not through promotion or succession planning, but when circumstances demand someone step up and make the brutal calls that peacetime leaders can't stomach.
Ben Horowitz wrote about this dichotomy in "The Hard Thing About Hard Things." Peacetime CEOs who build culture and consensus versus wartime CEOs who break rules to survive. But reading about it and living it are different things. The book doesn't quite capture the violent shift from building to surviving, from growth to triage, from "how do we win?" to "how do we not die?"
Here's what actually changes when you shift from peacetime to wartime:
Speed Becomes Everything
Monday morning: You're in a two-hour meeting debating the roadmap for Q3.
Monday afternoon: You're killing three product lines and two departments before close of business.
In peacetime, you make decisions after research, analysis, and consensus. In wartime, you make seventeen decisions before lunch because no decision is worse than a wrong decision. Your competitor just raised $50M while you were still building the Google Slides.
Democracy Dies
Peacetime: "Let's get everyone's input." "What does the team think?" "Have we surveyed the employees?"
Wartime: You stop asking and start telling. Not because you suddenly know better—you don't—but because the ship is sinking and democratic debate about which bucket to use is how everyone drowns.
You become a dictator. Not by choice, but by necessity.
Empathy Becomes Dangerous
In peacetime, you accommodate. Someone's kid is sick? Take the time you need. Feeling burned out? Let's talk about work-life balance. Need to find yourself? We support your journey.
In wartime, you become the person who says no to everything human. No, you can't take that vacation you planned six months ago. No, we can't delay the launch for your wedding. No, I don't care that you're burned out—we're all burned out, and if we don't fix this, we'll be burned out and unemployed.
You become the villain in everyone's story, including your own.
Paranoia Becomes Intelligence
Peacetime thinking: The market is big enough for everyone. Competitors are future partners. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Wartime thinking: Everyone wants you dead. That partnership meeting? They're gathering intel. That employee who just left? They took your playbook. That investor who passed? They're funding your competitor.
You develop a spreadsheet tracking every move the competition makes. Not because you're crazy, but because you're right—they really are trying to kill you.
Culture Becomes Binary
Peacetime: Complex values statements. Nuanced performance reviews. Careful attention to psychological safety and belonging.
Wartime: You're either fighting for survival or you're out. There's no middle ground. No time for hurt feelings. No energy for anything that doesn't directly keep the lights on.
The culture becomes Darwinian. The weak don't get developed. They get cut.
Here's the twist nobody talks about: Some people come alive in this chaos. That quiet engineer who never spoke up in peacetime meetings? She's suddenly shipping features at 3x speed. That middle manager everyone thought was mediocre? He's holding the entire operation together with duct tape and determination.
War reveals character. Some people discover they're warriors. Others discover they're not.
But here's what really happens to you, the accidental wartime CEO:
You start making every decision like the company dies tomorrow if you're wrong. You trust no one completely. You check Slack at 3am not because you need to, but because you can't not check. You become comfortable being hated. You stop apologizing for brutal decisions. You learn to live with the ghosts of the people you had to let go.
And then, if you're lucky, the crisis passes. The funding comes through. The product pivot works. The bleeding stops.
Everyone expects you to switch back to peacetime mode. Be collaborative again. Be empathetic again. Care about culture and consensus and career development.
But you can't. Not really.
Because once you've been the wartime CEO—once you've held the knife and decided who lives and who dies—you're changed. You'll always be waiting for the next crisis. Always keeping one eye on the door. Always ready to flip back into the person nobody likes but everybody needs.
The brutal truth? Most peacetime CEOs can't become wartime CEOs. Not because they're not smart enough, but because they can't flip the switch from being loved to being feared. They can't go from consensus to command. They hesitate when the moment demands brutality.
I'm watching it happen across the industry right now. CEOs who thrived in ZIRP times trying to adapt to this new reality. They're holding all-hands meetings to discuss layoffs instead of just cutting. They're forming committees to evaluate crisis responses. They're dying democratically.
But here's a very important learning: Being good at war doesn't mean you like it.
I hated every minute of being a wartime executive. Hated the 3am anxiety. Hated seeing fear in people's eyes when I walked into a room. Hated turning into someone my past self wouldn't recognize. I was good at it—maybe too good—but it extracted a cost.
The best soldiers aren't the ones who love war. They're the ones who hate it but will do what needs to be done when there's no other choice. They know the real victory isn't winning the war, it's preventing it from happening in the first place.
If you're a peacetime CEO reading this, here's my advice: Do everything in your power to stay in peacetime. Watch your burn rate religiously. Make the small cuts before you need to make big ones. Build reserves. Stay paranoid about competition while you still have time to respond strategically instead of desperately.
Because once you become a wartime CEO—even if you're good at it, especially if you're good at it—you lose something you can't get back. The ability to trust easily. The joy in building. The simple pleasure of a team meeting where no one's afraid.
I know how to be a wartime executive now. I know exactly what to do when someone says "whatever it takes." I'll do it if I have to.
But God, I hope I never have to again.