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

by Ben Horowitz

Then Jordan Breslow, my general counsel, came by and said, “Ben, this whole discussion is making me very uncomfortable.” I said, “Jordan, why? We’re not saying anything that’s not true, and if we miss the bookings number, that might lead to a blizzard of bad press followed by customers not trusting us and us missing another quarter and being forced to do a layoff.” He said, “Yes, but we are proposing to tell the truth in such a way that what people hear is not true.” I thought: Oh no, he’s right. I then made a rule that we would only report numbers related to revenue that were defined by standard accounting law and that had been audited by an outside firm. I had to change in order for us to change our culture from telling the truth to making sure people heard the truth. This shift derived from our original cultural goal of trust. Trust, as I discussed in the Louverture chapter, is the foundation of communication. Simply saying something you feel more or less comfortable terming “the truth” doesn’t build trust. What builds trust is the bona fide truth being heard.

Ben: If you have a crisis situation and you need the team to execute, meet with them every day and even twice a day if necessary. That will show them this is a top priority. At the beginning of each meeting you say, “Where’s my money?” They will start making excuses like “Boo Boo was supposed to call me and didn’t,” or “The system didn’t tell me the right thing.” Those excuses are the key, because that’s the knowledge you’re missing. Once you know that the excuse is that “Fred didn’t answer my email,” you can tell Fred to answer the damned email and also tell the person making the excuse that you expect way more persistence. The meetings will start out running long, but two weeks later they’ll be short, because when you say, “Where’s my money?” they are going to want to say, “Right here, Lea!”

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

To punish this killing, the Tayichiud captured Temujin and made him a slave, working him hard. Temujin soon escaped and was taken in by a poor family that hid him under fleeces when his captors came in search of him. This kindness from strangers, contrasted with his treatment by his rich kin the Tayichiud, made a strong impression. In Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford observes that the experience gave Temujin “the conviction that some people, even those outside his clan, could indeed be trusted as if they were family. In later life, he would judge others primarily by their actions toward him and not according to their kinship bonds, a revolutionary concept in steppe society.” As we shall see, judging others primarily by their actions is also a revolutionary concept in many of today’s corporate cultures.

Genghis realized that these warlords needed a common goal, and that it should be predicated not on the aristocrats’ dream of primacy, but rather on his soldiers’ primal desires. Genghis grasped that he could motivate them with “huge and exponential amounts of booty,” as McLynn puts it. This, in fact, would be their only form of payment.

The aim was to ensure loyalty to the khan, not to tribe or clan, and this loyalty could be secured if the rewards were big enough. . . . To keep his superstate in being, Genghis needed constant influxes of wealth, and that meant permanent conquest and war; too long a period of peace would encourage the powerful and frustrated custodians of his commonwealth to turn in on, and eventually against, themselves.

How Culture Affected Military Strategy Genghis Khan’s sweeping meritocracy made his army fundamentally different from—and more powerful than—any that came before it. In most armies, the leaders were on horseback while everyone else was slow-moving infantry; Genghis’s army consisted entirely of cavalry, so they were all equals and they all moved fast. Most armies had large units dedicated to providing supplies; in Genghis’s army, each man carried what he needed: clothes for all weathers, flints for making fires, canteens for water and milk, files to sharpen arrowheads, a lasso for rounding up animals or prisoners, sewing needles for mending clothes, a knife and a hatchet for cutting, and a skin bag for packing it all. They all milked their animals and fed themselves from hunting and looting.

This structure enabled the Mongols to outmaneuver, surround, and destroy their enemies. Mongol forces routinely defeated armies five times their size. And they often confounded conventional wisdom by attacking on two fronts at once, a tactic that forestalled neighboring princes from coming to each other’s aid, lest the next attack suddenly land on their own city. Genghis’s campaigns were marked by rapid advances—his cavalry could move sixty-five miles a day, and Mongolian ponies were as nimble as dogs—by clouds of arrows, alternate attacks from light and heavy cavalry, feigned retreats and frequent ambushes, and an unsporting reluctance to engage in hand-to-hand combat. They were guerrilla warriors who happened to have an army. The Jin people of China were only the first to be astonished by the Mongols’ mercurial strikes: “They come as though the sky were falling, and they disappear like a flash of lightning.”

As his armies surged forward, Genghis made sure that the best practices among the newly conquered were transmitted throughout his domain. In this way, the entire empire rose as one. Weatherford writes: Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism. 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. Genghis created a remarkably stable culture by founding it on three principles: meritocracy, loyalty, and inclusion.

Meritocracy After uniting the Mongols in 1189, Temujin made his first organizational innovation. In most steppe tribes, the khan’s court was an aristocracy consisting of his relatives. Weatherford writes: Temujin, however, assigned some dozen responsibilities to various followers according to the ability and loyalty of the individual without regard to kinship. He gave the highest positions as his personal assistants to his first two followers, Boorchu and Jelme, who had shown persistent loyalty to him for more than a decade. Mongol women were already treated unusually well for the time, but Genghis went on to abolish inherited aristocratic titles and eliminate the caste hierarchy; all men were equal. Shepherds and camel boys could now become generals. Temujin called all his subjects “the People of the Felt Walls”—the material used for the walls of their gers, or yurts. This symbolized that they were a single clan.

There was just one exception to this principle: Genghis himself. At his worst he behaved like any other despot. And he further weakened the meritocracy by favoring his own children with huge land grants after they complained that they’d been bypassed by commoners. McLynn writes, “To the question ‘Was Mongol society under Genghis Khan a rule-governed system or a tyranny?’ the answer can only be: both.”