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

by Ben Horowitz

egalitarian

misogynistic

vehement

obfuscation.

inoculate

emphatic,

tenets,

I will never fall behind others in pursuing the way of the warrior. I will always be ready to serve my lord. I will honor my parents. I will serve compassionately for the benefit of others.

“Keep death in mind at all times.”

If you realize that the life that is here today is not certain on the morrow, then when you take your orders from your employer, and when you look in on your parents, you will have the sense that this may be the last time—so you cannot fail to become truly attentive to your employer and your parents.

If you face death in that way, loyalty and familial duty to your employer and parents will be neglected, and your professional warriorhood will wind up defective. This will never do. The idea is to take care of your public and private duties day and night, and then whenever you have free time when your mind is unoccupied, you think of death, bringing it to mind attentively.

scrupulous

Every morning, samurai would diligently groom themselves by bathing in the open air, shaving their foreheads, putting fragrant oil in their hair, cutting their fingernails and filing them with pumice stone, then polishing them with wood sorrel. Of course, military equipment was kept neat, dusted, and oiled to be free of rust. Although paying so much attention to personal appearance may seem vain, it is because of the samurai’s resolve to die at any moment that he makes preparations so meticulously. If slain with an unkempt appearance, he will be scorned by his enemy as being unclean.

“Always on the Battlefield.”

Begin each day pondering death as its climax. Each morning, with a calm mind, conjure images in your head of your last moments.

Every morning, be sure to meditate yourself into a trance of death.

eight virtues: Rectitude or justice, courage, honor, loyalty, benevolence, politeness, self-control, and veracity or sincerity.

summarily

faux pas,

ord...

accost

A culture is not the sum of its outrage; it’s a set of actions.

duplicity?

The samurai combined the virtue of politeness with the virtue of veracity or sincerity.

Lying to be polite is politeness without form a...

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

Why you do right is not important. Doing right is all that counts.

chortled

effusive

retainer

duplicitous.

meritocracy.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Management.

The best way to understand your culture is not through what managers tell you, but through how new employees behave.

First impressions of a culture are difficult to reverse.

Cultural orientation is your chance to make clear the culture you want and how you intend to get it.

The truth is that what people do at the office, where they spend most of their waking hours, becomes who they are.

Believing in your own principles is necessary, but not sufficient.

transfer those principles to your team in a way that sticks.

Depending upon where the team is to begin with, this transfer may be a relatively minor effort or an immense undertaking. But it is critical, because it not only establis...

you are charismatic enough, you can sometimes get away with saying your culture is something it isn’t. People will believe you, at least for a while. But you won’t get the behaviors you ...

Cultural behaviors, once absorbed, get deployed everywhere.

you support the employee, he will learn two lessons: 1) you have his back, and 2) dropping the ball is totally acceptable. The way you treat that partner will eventually be the way your employees treat each other. As Senghor points out, culture travels.

virtues are superior to values, but until that understanding becomes widespread, a lot of companies will continue to have values.)

What builds trust is the bona fide truth being heard.

Culture is a strategic investment in the company doing things the right way when you are not looking.

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

subsumed

augury

Temujin