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

by Ben Horowitz

I knew I had to deal with a much deeper problem: because it had taken me years to find out that he was a compulsive liar, during which time he’d been promoted, it had become culturally okay to lie at LoudCloud. The object lesson had been learned. It did not matter that I never endorsed it: his getting away with it made it seem okay. How could I undo that lesson and restore our culture?

your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.

Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.

as business conditions shift and your strategy evolves, you have to keep changing your culture accordingly. The target is always moving.

“Coaching, and not direction, is the first quality of leadership now. Get the barriers out of the way to let people do the things they do well.” This created a new culture, a culture of empowerment: everyone was in charge and Noyce was there to help.

In meetings, the leader set the agenda, but everyone else was equal.

Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.

obviously good ideas are not truly innovative, and truly innovative ideas often look like very bad ideas when they’re introduced.

It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company—literally as well as figuratively.

The samurai called their principles “virtues” rather than “values”; virtues are what you do, while values are merely what you believe.

Companies—just like gangs, armies, and nations—are large organizations that rise or fall because of the daily microbehaviors of the human beings that compose them.

No large organization ever gets anywhere near 100 percent compliance on every value, but some do much better than others. Our aim here is to be better, not perfect.

they will never forget how it felt to work there, or the kind of people they became as a result. The company’s character and ethos will be the one thing they carry with them. It will be the glue that holds them together when things go wrong. It will be their guide to the tiny, daily decisions they make that add up to a sense of genuine purpose.

What you do is who you are.

Louverture used seven key tactics, which I examine below, to transform slave culture into one respected around the world. You can use them to change any organization’s culture.

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

If I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions at all, because I know that whatever you are doing is in my best interests.

As an organization grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If soldiers fundamentally trust the general, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t.

Building a great culture means adapting it to circumstances. And that often means bringing in outside leadership from the culture you need to penetrate or master.

No culture can flourish without the enthusiastic participation of its leader. No matter how well designed, carefully programmed, and insistently enforced your cultural elements are, inconsistent or hypocritical behavior by the person in charge will blow the whole thing up.

For a culture to stick, it must reflect the leader’s actual values, not just those he thinks sound inspiring. Because a leader creates culture chiefly by his actions—by example.

Integrity, honesty, and decency are long-term cultural investments. Their purpose is not to make the quarter, beat a competitor, or attract a new employee. Their purpose is to create a better place to work and to make the company a better one to do business with in the long run.

It’s because integrity is often at odds with other goals that it must be clearly and specifically inserted into the culture. If a company expects its people to behave ethically without giving them detailed instructions on what that behavior looks like and how to pursue it, the company will fall far short no matter whom it hires.

For Apple to become great again, it had to build on the aspect of its culture that had distinguished it in the past.

Jobs narrowed the product line to ensure that the company focused on delivering great experiences to individual humans rather than an impersonal set of specs, feeds, and speeds aimed at no one in particular.

if everything in a business culture is about winning, what behavior changes are necessary to achieve a win-win mindset?

When you inevitably take an action that’s inconsistent with your culture, the best fix is to admit it, then move to overcorrect the error. The admission and the self-correction have to be public enough and vehement enough to erase the earlier decision and become the new lesson.

What you measure is what you value.

The biggest threat to your company’s culture is a time of crisis, a period when you’re getting crushed by the competition or are nearing bankruptcy. How do you focus on the task at hand if you might be killed at any moment? The answer: they can’t kill you if you’re already dead. If you’ve already accepted the worst possible outcome, you have nothing to lose.

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?

“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?”

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

We respect the intense struggle of the entrepreneurial process and we know that without the entrepreneurs we have no business. When dealing with entrepreneurs, we always show up on time and we always get back to them timely and with substantive feedback, even if it’s bad news (like a rejection). We have an optimistic view of the future and believe that entrepreneurs, whether they succeed or fail, are working to help us achieve a better future. As a result, we never publicly criticize any entrepreneur or startup (doing so is a fireable offense).

We do not, however, dwell on trivial truths with the intention of hurting people’s feelings or making them look bad. We tell the truth to make people better not worse.

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

Second, they stamped their code deep with vivid stories. A hallmark

Will you do the right thing only if you risk getting caught for not doing it? How about if you don’t really risk getting caught? How about if you know nobody will know, nobody will miss getting the money, you don’t have a relationship with the person, and you really need the money? That last scenario is particularly challenging. If you don’t clarify exactly what “the right thing” is for a tough call like that, it won’t be totally clear what your employees should do when they come to one—and tough calls are what define a company and a culture.

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.

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 decisio...

And the third rule of snakes is: all opportunities start out ...

Once people realized that killing the snake was much more important than how we killed it, our new culture unleashed a flurry of creative energy.

If you handle external matters this way, people in your organization will look at that as a model. If you don’t, then the way you treat outsiders will leak back into your own organization.

As a leader, you can float along in a morally ambiguous frame of mind until you face a clarifying choice. Then you either evolve or you wall yourself up in moral corruption.

Once he realized he had to make significant changes, Senghor knew that he had to align his team more tightly. He used one of the best techniques for changing a culture—constant contact. By requiring his team to eat together, work out together, and study together, he made them constantly aware of the cultural changes he was making. Nothing signals the importance of an issue like daily meetings about it.

Culture is an abstract set of principles that lives—or dies—by the concrete decisions the people in your organization make.

How do you make sure the behaviors that you prescribe result in the culture that you want? How can you tell what’s actually going on? How can you know if you’ve succeeded?

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?

You must start from first principles. Every ecosystem has a default culture. (In Silicon Valley, our baked-in cultural elements range from casual dress to employee owners to long hours.) Don’t just blindly adopt it.