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

by Ben Horowitz

In fact, how your employees answer these kinds of questions is your culture.

Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.

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.

From this broader perspective, culture is the strong force in the universe.

Noyce didn’t hire professional managers. He said, “Coaching, and not direction, is the first quality of leadership now. Get the barriers out of the way to let people do the things they do well.” This created a new culture, a culture of empowerment:

everyone was in charge and Noyce was there to help. If a researcher had an idea, he could pursue it for a year before anyone would start inquiring about results.

But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company—literally as well as figuratively.

The samurai called their principles “virtues” rather than “values”; virtues are what you do, while values are merely what you believe.

(In what follows I will use “virtues” to refer to the ideal, and “values” to refer to what most

desirable product can overcome a miserable environment, at least for a while. If you don’t believe me, read up on Enron.

Culture isn’t a magical set of rules that makes everyone behave the way you’d like. It’s a system of behaviors that you hope most people will follow, most of the time.

Critics love to attack companies for having a “broken culture” or being “morally corrupt,” but it’s actually a minor miracle if a culture isn’t dysfunctional.

No large organization ever gets anywhere near 100 percent compliance on every value, but some do much better than others. Our ai...

Culture is to a company as nutrition and training are to an aspiring professional athlete. If the athlete is talented enough, he’ll succeed despite relatively poor nutrition and a below-average training regimen. If he lacks talent, perfect nutrition and relentless training will not qualify him for the Olympics. But great nutrition and training make every athlete better.

And sometimes you have to break a core principle of your culture to survive.

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.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a management book that recommends rewarding the loyal team generating all your revenue by booting them out of the company’s key meeting. But Hastings understood that moving the culture in the right direction trumped all other priorities. He had to shift the culture from one that prioritized content and logistics to one that prioritized content

The decisions you make influence your culture as much as anything. But the process you use to make those decisions also becomes a core part of your culture.