What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

by Ben Horowitz

Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.

“At Intel you don’t wait for someone else to do it. You take the ball yourself and run with it.” Grove would reply, “Wrong. At Intel you take the ball yourself and you let the air out and you fold the ball up and put it in your pocket. Then you take another ball and run with it and when you’ve crossed the goal you take the second ball out of your pocket and reinflate it and score twelve points instead of six.”

1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.

virtues are what you do, while values are merely what you believe.

Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. It’s what you do. What you do is who you are.

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

When everyone wants to know “Why?” in an organization, the answer programs the culture, because it’s an answer everyone will remember.

I often see companies that plan to go into new areas, but don’t want to shift their culture accordingly.

Building a great culture means adapting it to circumstances. And that often means bringing in outside leadership from the culture you need to penetrate or master.

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”

Here are the rules for writing a rule so powerful it sets the culture for many years: It must be memorable. If people forget the rule, they forget the culture. It must raise the question “Why?” Your rule should be so bizarre and shocking that everybody who hears it is compelled to ask, “Are you serious?” Its cultural impact must be straightforward. The answer to the “Why?” must clearly explain the cultural concept. People must encounter the rule almost daily. If your incredibly memorable rule applies only to situations people face once a year, it’s irrelevant.

We value ideas over hierarchy.

His instructions were specific, emphatic, and unceasing.

Bushido looks like a set of principles, but it’s a set of practices.

The samurai defined culture as a code of action, a system not of values but of virtues.

“The extent of one’s courage or cowardice cannot be measured in ordinary times. All is revealed when something happens.”

Were you a great place to work? What was it like to do business with you? Did your encounters with people leave them better off or worse off? Did the quality of your products make you proud?

the glue that binds a company culture is that the work must be meaningful for its own sake.

your individual reputation and honor should mean something within your company, and be at stake in everything you do.

A culture is not the sum of its outrage; it’s a set of actions.