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

by Ben Horowitz

Good intentions, pursued without meticulous forethought and follow-through, often lead to catastrophe.

If you’re having trouble seeing the value in a particular talent pool, the answer is not to set up a parallel talent process for those groups; the answer is to fix the talent process you have so you can cure your blindness.

For example, one criterion men often overlook when hiring a manager—but women rarely do—is the ability to give feedback. Women are more willing to confront a coworker and have a difficult conversation; men often avoid the issue until it gets superhot. We also made sure that our interview teams came from a range of backgrounds, so that we were better able to see the complete candidate.

The first step in getting the culture you want is knowing what you want. It sounds obvious and it is; it sounds easy, but it’s not. With seemingly infinite possibilities to choose from, how do you design a culture that gives your organization the advantages it needs, creates an environment you are proud of, and that—most importantly—can actually be implemented?

Cultures, like the organizations that create them, must evolve to meet new challenges.

All cultures are aspirational.

a company of any significant size there will always be violations. The point is not to be perfect, just better than you were yesterday.

Other people will always have ideas of what you should be, but if you try to integrate all those ideas in a way that’s inconsistent with your own beliefs and personality, you will lose your mojo.

Under the spotlight, managers find it very hard to just be themselves. Say that an excellent coworker, Stan, gets his first promotion to manager. All his colleagues are excited. But then Stan becomes “Manager Stan”—and magically transforms into a dick. Because he feels he has to establish his authority, he stops treating you like a person and starts treating you like someone he has to impress with his power. Nobody likes or respects Manager Stan.

If you follow the first rule of leadership, not everybody will like you. But trying to get everybody to like you makes things even worse. I know this, because not everybody likes me. In fact, I am sure someone reading this right now is saying, “Who does that old white dude think he is quoting Chance the Rapper?” I am okay with that. I don’t want to be cool. I just want to be me.

Think carefully about what your flaws are, because you don’t want to program them into your culture—or else leading by example will bite you in the ass.

I learned to counterprogram the culture against my inclinations in three ways: I surrounded myself with people who had the opposite personality trait. They wanted to finish the conversation as soon as possible and move on to the next thing. I made rules to help manage myself. If a meeting was called without a tightly phrased written agenda and a desired outcome, we’d cancel it. I announced to the company that we were committed to running meetings efficiently—talking the talk that I did not like walking, and forcing myself to walk it as much as I could.

Once you’re comfortable with who you are, you can begin to map that identity onto the culture you want.

It is much easier to walk the talk when the talk is your natural chatter. When I was a young manager, written feedback had a much greater impact on me than verbal feedback (even though I was obviously fond of chatting). I liked writing my own reports. As CEO of Opsware it made sense to me that written feedback would be a vital part of our culture. If I hated writing, that virtue would never have worked.

No matter how much you want a learning environment or a frugal company or a place where everyone works late, you will not get one unless that is what you instinctively do yourself. If the expressed culture goes one way but you walk in the opposite direction, the company will follow you, not your so-called culture.

Alas, any company of any significant size will have subcultures in addition to its main culture. Subcultures usually emerge because the divisions of a company are often quite distinct from one another. As different functions require different skill sets, salespeople, marketing people, HR people, and engineers tend to come from different schools, to have majored in different subjects, and to have different personality types. This leads to cultural variation.

Experienced salespeople like to say, “Buyers are liars.” That’s because, for a variety of reasons, buyers do not volunteer the truth. They may enjoy being wined and dined; they may be using you as a stalking horse to get a better price out of the competition; or they may just have a hard time saying “No.”

When you ask an engineer a question, her instinct is to answer it with great precision. When you ask a salesperson a question, she’ll try to figure out the question behind the question. If a customer asks, “Do you have feature X?” a good engineer will answer yes or no. A good salesperson will almost never answer that way. She will ask herself, “Why are they asking about that feature?

In a well-run organization, engineers get compensated more for how good the product is than for how much money it ends up bringing in, because there are often serious market risks that are outside the engineer’s control.

So the question of what do you want the culture to be and who do you want to hire are in some sense the same question.

when he was recruiting he looked for people who were smart, humble, hardworking, and collaborative.

A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?”

If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity for self-awareness, so you can actually learn and be smart.

Hardworking. It does not mean long hours. You can go home and take care of your family, but when you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. Take this job as an opportunity to do the best work of your life.

being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting. If there’s a lack of trust, I’m going to address that. If the goals are unclear, I’m going to deal with that. We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that.

Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation. This one is easy to corroborate with references, and in an interview you can ask, “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped to fix it.”

The questions employees everywhere ask themselves all the time are “Will what I do make a difference? Will it matter? Will it move the company forward? Will anybody notice?” A huge part of management’s job is to make sure the answer to all those questions is “Yes!”

The most important element of any corporate culture is that people care. They care about the quality of their work, they care about the mission, they care about being good citizens, they care about the company winning. So a gigantic portion of your cultural success will be determined by what gets rewarded at your company.

Many potential cultural elements are too abstract to be effective. If you define “integrity” as a virtue, will that clarify exactly how people should behave? If there’s a conflict, does integrity mean meeting your product schedule as promised or delivering the quality that your customers expect?

Is your virtue actionable? According to bushido, a culture is not a set of beliefs, but a set of actions.

Your employees will test you on your cultural virtues, either accidentally or on purpose, so before you put one into your company, ask yourself, “Am I willing to pass the test on this?”

Cultural rules can often become bloated sacred cows. Everyone tiptoes around them, trying to respect the culture—and then the cows topple and crush you. Strategies evolve, circumstances change, and you learn new things. When that happens, you must change your culture or you will end up pinned beneath it.

We did this through tightly enforced rules about how to treat entrepreneurs, such as being on time for meetings with them, always explaining our reasoning if we chose not to invest, and being honest about our concerns even if that risked the relationship.

Determining that your culture is broken is hard. It would be great if you could trust your employees to tell you. But a) they’d need the courage to do that, and b) the person complaining would have to be a good cultural fit themselves or the complaint might actually be a compliment (your culture is working and therefore the complainer, who can’t get with the program, doesn’t like it), and c) most complaints about culture are too abstract to be useful.

The wrong people are quitting too often. People quit all the time, but when the wrong people quit for the wrong reasons, it’s likely time to make a change. If your business is going well, yet people are leaving at a higher-than-industry-expected rate, you have a culture problem. If they’re precisely the people you want to keep, that’s an even worse sign.

If you’re not careful, the truth can become open to interpretation. Once lines were crossed, our interpretations became loose—as when some of our employees suggested that unguaranteed contracts be counted as bookings—and it was difficult to tighten them back up.

I needed an everyday lesson that said, “If you lie to your coworkers, you are fired.” If somebody behaves in a way you can’t believe, remember that your culture somehow made that acceptable.

An object lesson, by contrast, is a dramatic warning you put into effect after something bad has happened and you need to correct it in a way that will reset the culture and make sure the bad thing never happens again.

Sun Tzu knew that in a battle one soldier losing discipline could cost him everything. He needed the culture to be rock solid from the king to the concubines, and he made it so with a searing object lesson.

Flaky behavior often has a seriously problematic cause, from self-destructive streaks to drug habits to moonlighting for other employers. The cultural problem is that if a team is counting on the flake, and she’s allowed to flake without explanation, then everyone else on the team believes that he should be able to flake, too.

The most common cultural breakdown occurs after the decision has been made. Suppose you decide to cancel a software project. Suppose further that it was primarily a financial decision and the project’s manager disagreed. Now the manager has to inform the team. The team, frustrated that all their hard work is being thrown away, will be generally pissed. The natural thing for the manager to say is, “I hear you and, quite frankly, I agree with you, but I was overruled by the powers that be.” This is absolutely toxic to the culture.

it’s critical to a healthy culture that whatever your decision-making process, you insist on a strict rule of disagree and commit. If you are a manager, at any level, you have a fundamental responsibility to support every decision that gets made. You can disagree in the meeting, but afterward you must not only support the final decision, you must be able to compellingly articulate the reasons the decision was made.

As CEO, I wasn’t zero-tolerance about much, but I was definitely zero-tolerance on managers who undermined decisions, because that led to cultural chaos.

Even if you generally favor speed, it is often important culturally to favor accuracy in certain situations. If “great design” or “great taste” is a key part of your value proposition and your culture, then it might be useful to spend dozens of hours debating the exact shade of black of your product’s packaging. Taking such pains might not materially improve your sales, but it will absolutely reinforce the cultural message that you don’t take shortcuts about design.

The truth about telling the truth is that it doesn’t come easy. It’s not natural. What’s natural is telling people what they want to hear. That makes everybody feel good . . . at least for the moment. Telling the truth requires courage. Less remarked on—but equally important, for our purposes—is that it requires judgment and skill.

Trust derives from candor, and your company will fall apart if your employees don’t trust you. The trick—and it’s tricky—is to tell the truth without thereby destroying the company.

State the facts clearly . “We have to lay off thirty people because we came in four million dollars short of projections”—or whatever the case may be. Don’t pretend that you needed to clean up performance issues or that the company is better off without the people you so painstakingly hired. It is what it is and it’s important that everyone knows that you know that.

If your leadership caused or contributed to the setbacks that necessitated the layoff, cop to that. What was the thinking that led you to expand the company faster than you should have? What did you learn that will prevent you from making that mistake again?

Explain why taking the action you’re taking is essential to the larger mission and how important that mission is. A layoff, done properly, is a new lease on life for the company. It’s a hard but necessary step that will enable you to fulfill the prime directive, the mission that everyone signed up for: eventual success. It’s your job to make sure that the c...

Lincoln gave it fresh import in a speech so compact and powerful that it’s worth reading in its entirety. Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the...