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

by Ben Horowitz

In a 2015 corporate amnesty, thousands of Huawei employees admitted to transgressions ranging from bribery to fraud—perhaps, CEO Ren Zhengfei acknowledged, because the company used to evaluate staff solely according to how much business they won. Even after the seemingly shocking results of the amnesty program, Ren emailed everyone to say that adherence to ethical standards was important, of course, but “if it blocks the business from producing grain, then we all starve to death.” (You could argue, of course, that if Huawei was doing the bidding of the Chinese government—breaking the rules as a matter of national policy, the way an intelligence agency would—then its culture was doing exactly what it was supposed to.)