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

by Ben Horowitz

Horowitz roots his own definition of innovation in the deliberate choices he makes to center the leadership stories of present, past, and long past people of color far outside the C-suite or open floor plans of today’s tech giants.

tech industry’s most philosophically committed innovators—someone who defines creation not as the execution of an already good idea but as an original one that is so cutting edge that it is considered contrarian at best.

the most robust, sustainable cultures are those based on action, not words; an alignment of personality and strategy; an honest awareness and assessment of the norms imbibed on the first day of work by new—not veteran—employees grasping at what it will take to make it; an openness to including outside talent and perspectives; a commitment to explicit ethics and principled virtues that stand out and have meaning; and, not least, a willingness to come up with “shocking rules” within an organization that indelibly and inescapably prompt others to ask, “Why?”

Revel in being discarded, or having all your energies exhausted in vain; only those who have endured hardship will be of use. Samurai who have never erred before will never have what it takes. —Hagakure

How many of the following questions can be resolved by turning to your corporate goals or mission statement?

The right answers for your company depend on what your company is, what it does, and what it wants to be.

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.

Identifying the culture you want is hard: you have to figure out not only where your company is trying to go, but the road it should take to get there.

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.

The problem is that obviously good ideas are not truly innovative, and truly innovative ideas often look like very bad ideas when they’re introduced.

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

Companies—just like gangs, armies, and nations—are large organizations that rise or fall because of the daily microbehaviors of the human beings that compose them.

To avoid survivorship bias—the logical error of concentrating on companies that succeeded and falsely concluding that it was their culture that made them great—I try not to reverse engineer.

As a final word of discouragement:

In the end, the people who work for you won’t remember the press releases or the awards. They’ll lose track of the quarterly ups and downs. They may even grow hazy about the products. But they will never forget how it felt to work there, or the kind of people they became as a result. The company’s character and ethos will be the one thing they carry with them.

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.