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

by Ben Horowitz

When Jim Barksdale became the company’s CEO in 1995, he knew he had to change that culture. But how? Create a cultural value telling people to disagree and commit? While disagree and commit is a great decision-making rule, as I’ll discuss later, it’s not easy to insert it into a culture accustomed to doing the opposite. Imagine being in a heated debate and hearing someone say, “Let’s disagree and commit.” You’d respond, “Commit to what? My idea or yours?” So what did Barksdale do? He created a piece of lore so memorable it outlived the company itself. At a company all-hands he said: We have three rules here at Netscape. The first rule is if you see a snake, don’t call committees, don’t call your buddies, don’t form a team, don’t get a meeting together, just kill the snake. The second rule is don’t go back and play with dead snakes. Too many people waste too much time on decisions that have already been made. And the third rule of snakes is: all opportunities start out looking like snakes.