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

by Ben Horowitz

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.

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.

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.

Begin each day pondering death as its climax. Each morning, with a calm mind, conjure images in your head of your last moments. See yourself being pierced by bow and arrow, gun, sword, or spear, or being swept away by a giant wave, vaulting into a fiery inferno, taking a lightning strike, being shaken to death in a great earthquake, falling hundreds of feet from a high cliff top, succumbing to a terminal illness, or just dropping dead unexpectedly. Every morning, be sure to meditate yourself into a trance of death.

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?

The samurai code rested on eight virtues: Rectitude or justice, courage, honor, loyalty, benevolence, politeness, self-control, and veracity or sincerity. Each virtue was carefully defined and then reinforced through a set of principles, practices, and stories. They all worked together as a system, balancing one another in a way that made it very difficult for any individual virtue to be misunderstood or misused.

Without honor, every other virtue was worthless and bestial.

your individual reputation and honor should mean something within your company, and be at stake in everything you do. Does the integrity of that deal meet your standard? Does the quality of your team’s work measure up? Are you willing to put your name on it? If the customer or your competitor questions your behavior, are you comfortable knowing that you acted with honor?

Though the specific rules may seem arbitrary, they were rooted in the belief that politeness is the most profound way to express love and respect for others. It wasn’t just rule-following, but a gateway to deeper intimacy.

The samurai notion of sincerity was influenced by Confucius, who wrote: “Sincerity is the end and the beginning of all things; without Sincerity there would be nothing.”

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 tell the truth even if it hurts. When talking to an entrepreneur, an LP [limited partner], a partner, or each other, we strive to tell the truth. We are open and honest. We do not withhold material information or tell half truths. Even if the truth will be difficult to hear or to say, we err on the side of truth in the face of difficult consequences. 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.

we focused not on the value of respect, but on the virtue of being on time. If you were late for a meeting with an entrepreneur, you had to pay a fine of ten dollars per minute. Avoiding the fine took practice and hard work, and embedded a number of great habits into our culture. You had to plan your previous meeting correctly, so it wouldn’t conflict with the meeting with the entrepreneur. You not only had to end that meeting with discipline, but you had to run it with discipline, so everything got done in the time allotted. You had to avoid being distracted by random texts or emails. You even had to think about when to go to the restroom.

Being “founder friendly” implies that you take the founder’s side even when he is mistaken. This kind of “virtue” helps nobody. In fact, it creates a culture of lies. Any time you decide one group is inherently good or bad regardless of their behavior, you program dishonesty into your organization.

The story makes no ultimate distinction between doing right for “the right reasons” or out of shame or guilt. Why you do right is not important. Doing right is all that counts. But the people who created the code understood that doing right is harder in some circumstances than others, so they provided case studies.

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.

I asked Oprah if she wouldn’t mind riding with me to the interview, so that she could school me on the art of drawing people out and help me avoid total embarrassment. In the car, she said, “The first thing you need to know is that you cannot work off a list of questions, because if you do you won’t listen and you will miss the most important question: the follow-up question.”

He displayed all the skills this book hopes to impart: he shaped a culture, recognized its flaws, then transformed it into something better.

“If a leader does not follow his own instructions, is he a leader?” Our members began to realize we needed to change, and they followed my idea that we’re going to do what the fuck we say we’re gonna do. As I rose to the top, the old leaders gradually became executive advisors. They still had privileges, but no direct control.

When you have power, you have responsibility.

First I had to learn there was a different way, then I had to master those skills, then I had to decide that was truly how I wanted to live my life. It was a three-step process, and it took me nine years to get through it.

If you’re not honoring the culture yourself, nobody fucking believes you. The principles were my natural principles. I believed in them. I was also willing to defend them. This shifted the culture to a better place.

Culture is weird like that. Because it’s a consequence of actions rather than beliefs, it almost never ends up exactly as you intend it. This is why it’s not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. You must constantly examine and reshape your culture or it won’t be your culture at all.

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.

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.

That’s the power of culture. If you want to change who you are, you have to change the culture you’re in.

Culture is an abstract set of principles that lives—or dies—by the concrete decisions the people in your organization make. As a leader, this gap between theory and practice poses huge challenges. How do you get an organization to behave when you’re not around to supervise? 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.

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.

The best way to understand your culture is not through what managers tell you, but through how new employees behave. What behaviors do they perceive will help them fit in, survive, and succeed? That’s your company’s culture.

ask new employees these questions directly after their first week. And make sure you ask them for the bad stuff, the practices or assumptions that made them wary and uncomfortable. Ask them what’s different than other places they’ve worked—not just what’s better, but what’s worse. And ask them for advice: “If you were me, how would you improve the culture based on your first week here? What would you try to enhance?”

Who can get things done, and why? What did they do to get in that position? Can you replicate it? At the same time, how you behave on arrival—how other people see you—affects your standing and potential in the company and determines your personal brand.

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. What behaviors will be rewarded? Which ones will be discouraged or severely punished? People’s receptivity when they join, and the lasting impact of first impressions, is why the new-employee process is the most important one to get right. If your company’s process for recruiting, interviewing, orienting, training, and integrating new employees is intentional and systematic, great. If any part of it is accidental, then so is your culture.

You might think you can build a ruthlessly competitive culture that your employees use only to deal with outside forces but set aside when dealing with each other. You might think you can build an abusive, shame-you-for-your-failures culture that people participate in at work, but relinquish at quitting time. But that’s not how it works. Cultural behaviors, once absorbed, get deployed everywhere.

Collaborative people know that their success is limited by uncollaborative people, so they are either going to help those people raise their game or they are going to get rid of them.

I had to change in order for us to change our culture from telling the truth to making sure people heard the truth.

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.

Culture can feel abstract and secondary when you pit it against a concrete result that’s right in front of you. Culture is a strategic investment in the company doing things the right way when you are not looking.

judging others primarily by their actions is also a revolutionary concept in many of today’s corporate cultures.

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.

Genghis instituted a radical change in the protocols of warfare. Rather than treating conquered aristocratic leaders with special care and enslaving the rank and file, he executed the aristocrats (so they couldn’t later rise against him) and incorporated the soldiers into his army. In this way he not only swelled his ranks, but also established himself as an equal-opportunity employer, the guy whose team you wanted to be on.

Anyone could have added enemy soldiers into his army—everyone from the Romans on had—but Genghis’s stroke of brilliance was treating those soldiers so well that they became more loyal to him than to their original leaders.

Genghis codified many aspects of inclusiveness into law. He outlawed kidnapping women and made it illegal to sell them into marriage (even as his warriors continued to rape and take concubines from among the defeated). He declared all children to be legitimate, thereby eliminating the concept of illegitimate or lesser people. And he introduced, perhaps for the first time anywhere, total religious freedom. While conquered peoples had to swear allegiance to Genghis and had to obey the Mongols’ common law—and while he executed clerics and imams who preached against him—they could otherwise believe what they liked and follow their own laws. He was a pragmatist, not a zealot.

The self-help guru Tony Robbins says the quality of your life is a function of the quality of questions you ask yourself.

I was expecting sympathy and all I got from him was strength. It kind of shocked me out of my own b.s.

I was tasked with helping the regional managers improve their business. Well, if I walked in saying that, I’d instantly become the enemy. With Raymond’s coaching, I developed a much more effective approach. I would say, “Look, I am here to help in any way I can. I’m not coming in to tell you what to do. What I can do is help you understand your performance relative to other regions and help you hit your plan.” That approach changed the whole dynamic. If you are the one guy wanting to help, then the regional managers would embrace you.

“Everybody wanted to show me the org chart, to make sure I understood the pecking order. I didn’t even look at it, because I believe that work gets done through the go-to people. They may not have titles and positions, but they’re the ones who get the work done.”