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

by Ben Horowitz

Meditating on your company’s downfall will enable you to build your culture the right way. Imagine you’ve gone bankrupt. 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?

Bill Campbell, used to say, “We are doing it for each other. How much do you care about the people you’re working with? Do you want to let them down?”

“Sincerity is the end and the beginning of all things; without Sincerity there would be nothing.”

Any time you decide one group is inherently good or bad regardless of their behavior, you program dishonesty into your organization.

Stories and sayings define cultures.

Culture is weird like that. Because it’s a consequence of actions rather than beliefs, it almost never ends up exactly as you intend it. This is why it’s not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. You must constantly examine and reshape your culture or it won’t be your culture at

That’s the power of culture. If you want to change who you are, you have to change the culture you’re in. Fortunately for the world he did. What he did is who he is.

Culture is an abstract set of principles that lives—or dies—by the concrete decisions the people in your organization make. As a leader, this gap between theory and practice poses huge challenges.

Your own perspective on the culture is not that relevant. Your view or your executive team’s view of your culture is rarely what your employees experience. What Shaka Senghor experienced on his first day out of quarantine transformed him. The relevant question is, What must employees do to survive and succeed in your organization? What behaviors get them included in, or excluded from, the power base? What gets them ahead?

Embedding cultural elements you don’t subscribe to will eventually cause a cultural collapse.

To change a culture, you can’t just give lip service to what you want. Your people must feel the urgency of it.

Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries.

Don’t see me as a bastard or a black bone. See me as a first-class citizen and I will help you conquer the world.

If the key to effective inclusion is seeing people for who they are, then how do we make sure that we really see them?

He was deeply involved in the strategy and implementation, down to having his own mother adopt children from a conquered tribe to symbolize the integration process. He started with the job description he needed to fill, be it cavalry, doctors, scholars, or engineers, and then went after the talent to fill it. He did not assume that every person with a particular background could do the job that people with similar backgrounds had done—that all Chinese officials would make great administrators. Not only did he make sure that conquered people were treated equally, but through adoption and intermarriage, he made them kin. They weren’t brought into the empire under some separate but supposedly equal side program. As a result, they felt truly equal—and became more loyal to him and to the Mongols than to their original clans.

Good intentions, pursued without meticulous forethought and follow-through, often lead to catastrophe.

People who come from different backgrounds and cultures bring different skills, different communication styles, and different mores to the organization.

Whereas if everyone is hired on the same criteria, then the culture will see people for who they are and what they uniquely bring to the table.

I don’t want you to be me, you should just be you. —Chance the Rapper

The first step in getting the culture you want is knowing what you want.

Whether your company is a startup or a hundred years old, designing your culture is always relevant. Cultures, like the organizations that create them, must evolve to meet new challenges.

All cultures are aspirational. I have worked with thousands of companies and none of them ever achieved total cultural compliance or harmony. In a company of any significant size there will always be violations. The point is not to be perfect, just better than you were yesterday.

While you can draw inspiration from other cultures, don’t try to adapt another organization’s ways. For your culture to be vibrant and sustainable, i...

If you aren’t yourself, even you won’t follow you.

If you follow the first rule of leadership, not everybody will like you. But trying to get everybody to like you makes things even worse.

There are parts of any CEO’s personality that he doesn’t actually want in the company. Think carefully about what your flaws are, because you don’t want to program them into your culture—or else leading by example will bite you in the ass.

It is much easier to walk the talk when the talk is your natural chatter.

A company’s culture needs to reflect the leader’s sensibilities. No matter how much you want a learning environment or a frugal company or a place where everyone works late, you will not get one unless that is what you instinctively do yourself. If the expressed culture goes one way but you walk in the opposite direction, the company will follow you, not your so-called culture.

The management consultant Peter Drucker famously said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

But the truth is that culture and strategy do not compete. Neither eats the other. Indeed, for either to be effective, they must cohere.

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

Great engineers love to build things and often code on side projects as a hobby. So creating a comfortable environment that encourages round-the-clock programming is vital. Hallmarks of engineering cultures often include casual dress, late morning arrival times, and late or very late evening departure times.

Great sales cultures are competitive, aggressive, and highly compensated—but only for results.

While every company needs core common cultural elements, trying to make all aspects of your culture identical across functions means weakening some functions in favor of others.

virtues must be based on actions rather than beliefs.

Making your hiring profile a big part of how you define your culture makes enormous sense—because who you hire determines your culture more than anything else.

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?”

in an interview you can ask, “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped to fix it.”

The questions employees everywhere ask themselves all the time are “Will what I do make a difference? Will it matter? Will it move the company forward? Will anybody notice?” A huge part of management’s job is to make sure the answer to all those questions is “Yes!”

The most important element of any corporate culture is that people care. They care about the quality of their work, they care about the mission, they care about being good citizens, they care about the company winning. So a gigantic portion of your cultural success will be determined by what gets rewarded at your company.

Every time an employee works hard to make a change or to propose a new idea only to be met with bureaucracy, indecision, or apathy, the culture suffers. Every time an employee is recognized or rewarded fo...

If your organization can’t make decisions, can’t approve initiatives quickly, or has voids where leadership should be, it doesn’t matter how many great people you hire or how much work you spend defining your culture. Your culture will be defined by indifference, because that’s what you’re rewarding.

Some ways of thinking about a virtue’s effectiveness: Is your virtue actionable? According to bushido, a culture is not a set of beliefs, but a set of actions. What actions do your cultural virtues translate to? Can you turn empathy, for instance, into an action? If so, it may work as a virtue. If not, best to design your culture with a different virtue. Does your virtue distinguish your culture? Not every virtue will be unique to your company, but if every other business in your field does the same thing, there is probably no need to emphasize it. If you’re a Silicon Valley company, there is no need to make casual dress a virtue, because that’s the default behavior. But if you’re a technology company and you want everyone to wear a suit and tie, that will define your culture. If you are tested on this virtue, will you pass the test?

Your employees will test you on your cultural virtues, either accidentally or on purpose, so before you put one into your company, ask yourself, “Am I willing to pass the test on this?”

You’re quite hostile, I’ve got a right to be hostile, my people been persecuted. —Public Enemy

If the actions aren’t working, it’s time to get some new ones.

Determining that your culture is broken is hard. It would be great if you could trust your employees to tell you. But a) they’d need the courage to do that, and b) the person complaining would have to be a good cultural fit themselves or the complaint might actually be a compliment (your culture is working and therefore the complainer, who can’t get with the program, doesn’t like it), and c) most complaints about culture are too abstract to be useful.

The wrong people are quitting too often.

You’re failing at your top priorities.

An employee does something that truly shocks you.