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

by Ben Horowitz

your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there.

Culture isn’t a magical set of rules that makes everyone behave the way you’d like. It’s a system of behaviors that you hope most people will follow, most of the time.

Culture is to a company as nutrition and training are to an aspiring professional athlete.

Because who you are is how people talk about you when you’re not around.

It’s what you do. What you do is who you are. This book aims to help you do the things you need to do so you can be who you want to be.

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

Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but, like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs.

The reason so many efforts to establish “corporate values” are basically worthless is that they emphasize beliefs instead of actions. Culturally, what you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are.

A culture is not the sum of its outrage; it’s a set of actions. In a competitive corporate world, politeness might seem like a throwaway virtue. In fact, the way the samurai took the action-oriented nature of politeness and used it to express the abstract concepts of love and respect is exceptionally instructive.

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

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.

All cultures are aspirational.

If your organization can’t make decisions, can’t approve initiatives quickly, or has voids where leadership should be, it doesn’t matter how many great people you hire or how much work you spend defining your culture. Your culture will be defined by indifference, because that’s what you’re rewarding.

According to bushido, a culture is not a set of beliefs, but a set of actions. What actions do your cultural virtues translate to? Can you turn empathy, for instance, into an action?

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.

Everyone on the team will feel marginalized because they work for someone who’s powerless. This makes them one level less than powerless. They have just been demoted from the bottom of the totem pole to the ground beneath it.

As you think about bad news and how you might fear your people finding out and freaking out, remember Gettysburg. Be it a deal gone bad, a whiffed quarter, or a layoff, this is your chance to define not only the event, but the character of your company. And no matter how badly you screwed up, you didn’t send thousands of soldiers to their deaths. There are companies