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

by Ben Horowitz

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

“Hey, motherfucker! I’m the CEO. I make the decisions.”

Funny Ben Horowitz quote

The samurai defined culture as a code of action, a system not of values but of virtues. A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody.

Two lessons for leaders jump out from Senghor’s experience:

Your own perspective on the culture is not that relevant.

You must start from first principles.

Genghis created a remarkably stable culture by founding it on three principles: meritocracy, loyalty, and inclusion.

There were three keys to Genghis Khan’s approach to inclusion:

Every organization tended to resemble the person in charge. If a woman ran the company, women were overrepresented. If a Chinese-American person ran engineering, you’d find lots of Chinese-American engineers. If an Indian-American ran marketing, there’d be Indian-Americans all over the marketing department. Why? It all started with the hiring profile. People understand their own strengths, value them highly, and know how to test for them in an interview.

I knew we had to change our selection process if we wanted to compete at the highest level. Like many companies, our recruiting networks emanated from our employees. So we had to broaden our talent network.

Next, we changed our hiring process. When a manager wants to make a new hire, she must now have people from talent pools different from her own (for instance, U.S. military veterans, African-Americans, etc.) review the hiring criteria and make suggestions about what they would hire for and how they would test for those qualities.

We also made sure that our interview teams came from a range of backgrounds, so that we were better able to see the complete candidate.

Olajuwon said that he himself was the opposite: exactly the same in public and private. As a result, he was indeed a role model. This interview revealed a key to leadership: you must be yourself.

I am sure someone reading this right now is saying, “Who does that old white dude think he is quoting Chance the Rapper?” I am okay with that. I don’t want to be cool. I just want to be me.

Pick the virtues that will help your company accomplish its mission.

Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity. A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?”

Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity for self-awareness, so you can actually learn and be smart. Humility is foundational like that. It is also essential for the kind of collaboration we want at Slack.

Hardworking. It does not mean long hours. You can go home and take care of your family, but when you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. T...

Collaborative. It’s not submissive, not deferential—in fact it’s kind of the opposite. In our culture, being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting. If there’s a lack of trust, I’m going to address that. If the goals are unclear, I’m going to deal with that. We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that. If everyone’s collaborative in that sense, the responsibility for team performance is shared. Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation. This one is ea...

The Prophet of Rage

Interesting profile of hard to manage but potentially amazing employee

There are essentially three high-level decision-making styles: My way or the highway. This leader says, “I don’t care what you all think, we’re doing it my way. If you don’t like it, the door is right behind you.” This is maximally efficient as the decision-making process requires no discussion at all. Everyone has a say. This leader favors a democratic process. If he could call for a formal vote on every decision, he would. Decisions take a long time to get made, but everybody is guaranteed a say. Everyone has input, then I decide. This leader seeks a balance between getting the right information and using all the brain power available, and keeping the process efficient. Her process is not as empowering as Everyone has a say or as efficient as My way or the highway.

critical to a healthy culture that whatever your decision-making process, you insist on a strict rule of disagree and commit.

noted in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, peacetime and wartime put a CEO in very different modes:

Good summary from the previous book

Your company’s culture should be an idiosyncratic expression of your personality, beliefs, and strategy—and it should keep evolving as your company grows and conditions change.

There are three keys to assigning meaning: State the facts clearly . “We have to lay off thirty people because we came in four million dollars short of projections”—or whatever the case may be. Don’t pretend that you needed to clean up performance issues or that the company is better off without the people you so painstakingly hired. It is what it is and it’s important that everyone knows that you know that. If your leadership caused or contributed to the setbacks that necessitated the layoff, cop to that. What was the thinking that led you to expand the company faster than you should have? What did you learn that will prevent you from making that mistake again? Explain why taking the action you’re taking is essential to the larger mission and how important that mission is. A layoff, done properly, is a new lease on life for the company. It’s a hard but necessary step that will enable you to fulfill the prime directive, the mission that everyone signed up for: eventual success. It’s your job to make sure that the company didn’t lay off those people for no ultimate purpose—something good needs to come of it.

call these submerged issues kimchi problems, because the deeper you bury them, the hotter they get.

There are several reasons employees don’t naturally tend to volunteer bad news: It seems to conflict with an ownership culture. A common management adage is “Don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution.” This idea encourages ownership, empowerment, and responsibility among the employees, but it has a dark side. For one thing, what employees are likely to hear is just “Don’t bring me a problem.” At a deeper level, what if you know about a problem but you can’t solve it? What if you’re an engineer who sees a fundamental weakness in your software architecture, but doesn’t have the authority or expertise to fix it? What if you’re a salesperson who believes one of your colleagues is making fraudulent promises? How can you solve that without help? If you encourage bad news, you must be careful not to disempower people in doing so. The company’s long-term goals may not align with an employee’s short-term incentives. Imagine that your new product must ship this quarter. It’s so critical you’ve offered a shipping bonus to the engineers. Now imagine that the product has a dangerous security flaw. If you’re an engineer who discovers the flaw, but you need the bonus to buy holiday presents for your children, what do you do? Nobody likes to get yelled at. If you know about a problem, there’s a reasonable chance that you caused it and have no idea how to fix it. Revealing it to your superiors means admitting guilt, and who likes to do that?

Many managers want to attend executive staff meetings, as it makes them feel needed and it puts them in the know. I made use of this desire by setting a price of admission to the meeting: you had to fess up to at least one thing that was “on fire.”

Cultural design. Make sure your culture aligns with both your personality and your strategy. Anticipate how it might be weaponized and define it in a way that’s unambiguous. Cultural orientation. An employee’s first day at work may not be as indelible as Shaka Senghor’s first day out of quarantine, but it always makes a lasting impression. People learn more about what it takes to succeed in your organization on that day than on any other. Don’t let that first impression be wrong or accidental. Shocking rules. Any rule so surprising it makes people ask “Why do we have this rule?” will reinforce key cultural elements. Think about how you can shock your organization into cultural compliance. Incorporate outside leadership. Sometimes the culture you need is so far away from the culture you have that you need to get outside help. Rather than trying to move your company to a culture that you don’t know well, bring in an old pro from the culture you aspire to have. Object lessons. What you say means far less than what you do. If you really want to cement a lesson, use an object lesson. It need not be a Sun Tzu–style beheading, but it must be dramatic. Make ethics explicit. One of the most common and devastating mistakes leaders make is to assume people will “Do the right thing” even when it conflicts with other objectives. Don’t leave ethical principles unsaid. Give cultural tenets deep meaning. Make them stand out from the norm, from the expected. If the ancient samurai had defi...