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

by Ben Horowitz

I focused all my energy on “leading by example.” To my bewilderment and horror, that method did not scale as the company grew and diversified. Our culture became a hodgepodge of different cultures fostered under different managers,

It did not matter that I never endorsed it: his getting away with it made it seem okay.

In fact, how your employees answer these kinds of questions is your culture. Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there.

if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.

Hierarchies are good at weeding out obviously bad ideas.

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

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

Weren’t the rebels trying to destroy the Europeans and all that they stood for? Definitely not. The rebels were trying to build an army that could set them free and a culture that could sustain their independence. So they adopted the best practices from armies that had succeeded before them.

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.

It must raise the question “Why?” Your rule should be so bizarre

Then I’m looking at the conference room names—Salt-N-Pepa, Notorious B.I.G.—and I’m like, What the fuck are these? When I realize they’re the names of rappers I think, Jeez, this is not going to go well.

Hastings had long kept looking over his shoulder for a pure-streaming company that would run right by Netflix. He knew that that competitor wouldn’t have any DVD execs in its meetings. So why should Netflix,

Louverture knew that telling people that agriculture was a priority wouldn’t make it so. He had to do something dramatic to demonstrate that it was the highest priority—something everyone would remember. He forgave the slave owners and let them keep their land. Nothing could be clearer.

Kalanick didn’t intend to build an unethical organization, just a hypercompetitive one. But he had bugs in his code.

Does “Do the right thing” mean make the quarter or tell the truth? Does it mean use your judgment or obey the law? Does it mean you can excuse losses by claiming some moral imperative? Will employees who are hired from a culture like Facebook have a different view of “Do the right thing” than employees hired from Oracle?

remember that ethics are about hard choices. Do you tell a little white lie to investors or do you lay off a third of the company? Do you get publicly embarrassed by a competitor or do you deceive a customer? Do you deny someone a raise that they need or do you make your company a little less fair?

we get on Twitter and decry the lack of empathy in our country—and then we wonder why empathy keeps diminishing. A culture is not the sum of its outrage; it’s a set of actions.

“If you cannot see your car from your hotel room, then you are paying too much.”

we operated like a debate club. A debate club where everyone wanted to weigh in on every decision and then, if they lost, to revisit the decision as often as possible.

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 decisions that have already been made. And the third rule of snakes is: all opportunities start out looking like snakes.

When you ask your managers, “What is our culture like?” they’re likely to give you a managed answer that tells you what they think you want to hear and doesn’t hint at what they think you absolutely do not want to hear. That’s why they’re called managers.

where they spend most of their waking hours, becomes who they are. Office culture is highly infectious. If the CEO has an affair with an employee, there will be many affairs

culture from telling the truth to making sure people heard the truth.

If you ask, “Why am I so fat?” your brain will say, “Because I am stupid and have no willpower.” Robbins’s point is that if you ask a bad question you will get a bad answer and you will live a bad life.

The salesman sold life insurance policies just large enough to cover the cost of a funeral.