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

by Ben Horowitz

the most robust, sustainable cultures are those based on action, not words; an alignment of personality and strategy; an honest awareness and assessment of the norms imbibed on the first day of work by new—not veteran—employees grasping at what it will take to make it; an openness to including outside talent and perspectives; a commitment to explicit ethics and principled virtues that stand out and have meaning; and, not least, a willingness to come up with “shocking rules” within an organization that indelibly and inescapably prompt others to ask, “Why?”

So 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.

Say someone steals one of your guys’ toothbrushes, what do you do?” I said, “That seems innocent enough. Maybe the thief just wanted clean teeth?” He corrected me: “A guy doesn’t take that risk for clean teeth. It’s a diagnostic. If we don’t respond, then he knows he can rob your guy of something larger or rape him or kill him and take over his business. So if I do nothing, I put all our members at risk. Killing the guy would be a big deterrent—but it would also create a superviolent culture.” He spread his hands. “As I said, it’s complex.”

if you have a strong culture but a product nobody wants, you fail. So culture might appear to be weaker than product. But if you look more deeply, over time, culture can overcome the seemingly invincible structural barriers of an era and transform the behavior of entire industries and social systems.

In the 1970s, a bunch of poor kids from the Bronx created a new art form, hip-hop. In a single generation they overcame poverty, racism, and massive opposition from the music industry to build the world’s most popular musical genre. They changed global culture by inventing a culture premised on candor and a hustler’s mentality.

“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.

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

The Intel culture, by elevating the individual and giving breakthrough ideas a chance, inaugurated a better way to do business.

But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? 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.

Why has there been only one successful slave revolt in human history? And how did Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture reprogram slave culture to orchestrate it?

How did bushido, the code of the samurai, enable the warrior class to rule Japan for seven hundred years and shape modern Japanese culture? What set of cultural virtues empowered them?

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

How did Genghis Khan build the world’s largest empire? He was a total outsider, imprisoned as a youngster by his own tiny nomadic tribe. It’s easy to see how that made him want to smash existing hierarchies. But how, exactly, was he able to create an innovative and inclusive meritocracy?

How did Shaka Senghor, sentenced to nineteen years in a Michigan prison for murder, make his prison gang the tightest, most ferocious group in the yard—and then transform it into something else entirely? How did culture turn him into a killer? How did he rise to dominate that culture? How did he take a group of outcasts and turn them into a cohesive team? Finally, how did he recognize what he disliked about his regime, and, by changing himself, change the entire prison culture?

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.

As an entrepreneur, I had trained myself to think in contrarian ways. The secret to finding a breakthrough idea, as Peter Thiel says, is that you have to believe something that nobody else does.

One day, as he was returning from Mass carrying his prayer book, a white man took notice. Louverture would recall that the man “broke my head with a wooden stick while telling me ‘do you not know that a negro should not read?’” Louverture apologized and stumbled home. He kept the vest soaked with his blood as a reminder of the incident. Years later, after the rebellion began, he met his tormenter again and, his biographer Philippe Girard writes with satisfaction, “killed him on the spot.”

Louverture gradually came to a realization that no one else in colonial Saint-Domingue had arrived at: culture, not color, determined behavior. One astonishing demonstration of this truth was that after he’d been freed, Louverture purchased slaves, usually to free them in turn.

After Louis XVI was guillotined in Paris in 1793, the British and Spanish invaded Saint-Domingue, each hoping to seize the prize while France was preoccupied. Once Spain declared war on France, Louverture went to the Spanish commander and offered to integrate his six hundred men into the Spanish army, which other rebellious slave groups were also joining. And so Louverture became a colonel in the Spanish army, fighting the French. The following year, seeing an advantage for himself and his troops, Louverture defected to the French army. Within a year, he and his men, now five thousand strong, had retaken almost all of the French towns he had just conquered for Spain, and subdued several rebel groups still allied with the Spanish.

In 1797, in the midst of the long revolt, Louverture demonstrated that he could not only lead troops, but also persuade and inspire civilians with his vision for a new way of life.

Louverture’s response was to publish a justification of the Haitian Revolution that laid out his theory of race and culture. As Philippe Girard wrote, “One by one he listed Vaublanc’s accusations; one by one he took them apart.

London Gazette wrote: Toussaint L’Ouverture is a negro and in the jargon of war has been called a brigand. But according to all accounts, he is a negro born to vindicate the claims of this species and to show that the character of men is independent of exterior color.

Louverture used seven key tactics,

creating a new civilization out of whole cloth—as Lenin would later try and fail to do—would never succeed. People don’t easily adopt new cultural norms and they simply can’t absorb an entirely new system all at once.

The Europeans had no means of long-distance, encrypted communication, but his army did. His soldiers would place themselves in the woods surrounding the enemy, scattered in clumps. They would begin their voodoo songs—which were incomprehensible to the European troops—and when they reached a certain verse, it was the signal to attack in concert.

Louverture applied their guerrilla tactics, particularly their way of choosing to meet the enemy in the woods to envelop them and crush them with sheer numbers. As we will see, he would combine this stratagem with the most advanced European tactics to create a hybrid force unlike any his opponents had faced.

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

To instill trust throughout his army, Louverture established a rule so shocking it begged the question “Why do we have that rule?” The rule forbade married officers from having concubines. As raping and pillaging were the norm for soldiers, requiring officers to respect their marital vows must have seemed absurd.

When everyone wants to know “Why?” in an organization, the answer programs the culture, because it’s an answer everyone will remember.

New officers would ask, “Tell me again why I can’t have a concubine?” And be told: “Because in this army, nothing is more important than your word. If we can’t trust you to keep your word to your wife, we definitely can’t trust you to keep your word to us.”

Marriage, honesty, and loyalty were symbols of the society that Louverture aspired to lead—and he programmed them all into his culture with one simple shocking rule.

to give them a sense that they were an elite fighting force—Louverture and his corevolutionaries dressed in the most elaborate military uniforms attainable. It was a constant reminder of who they were and what they might achieve.

Julius Caesar did this to great effect when he built the Roman Empire. Rather than executing vanquished leaders, he often left them in place so that they could govern the region using their superior understanding of the local culture.

Nonetheless, he brought mulattoes into his army and incorporated deserting French royalist officers, whom he used to organize an efficient staff and train his army in the orthodox military arts.

When blacks told him they wouldn’t obey whites or mulattoes, he would pour a glass of wine and a glass of water, then mix them together and say, “How can you tell which is which?

To defeat the French, Louverture needed to understand and master that culture and its military tactics, so he brought in leaders with that knowledge.

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.

The more counterintuitive the leader’s decision, the stronger the impact on the culture.

So Louverture not only let the plantation owners live, he let them keep their land. But he insisted that they pay their laborers one-fourth of the profits. And he ordered them to live on their plantations, so they would be directly accountable for paying their workers and treating them well. If they disobeyed, their land was confiscated.

He asked a great deal from his soldiers, but he was more than willing to embody his own standards. He lived with the men in his army and shared their labors. If a cannon had to be moved, he pitched in, once getting a hand badly crushed in the process. He charged at his troops’ head, something Europe had rarely seen from a leader since Alexander the Great, and was wounded seventeen times.

Facing Rigaud’s last supporters, Louverture delivered his verdict: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Return to your duty, I have already forgotten everything.”

For a culture to stick, it must reflect the leader’s actual values, not just those he thinks sound inspiring.

One difficulty in implementing integrity is that it’s a concept without boundaries.

The behaviors must be universal; you have to live up to them in every context.

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.

“Never was a European army subjected to more severe discipline than that observed by Louverture’s troops.” The contrast with the French was stark. As C. L. R. James observed, “The soldier emigres, Dessources and some others, vicomtes, and chevaliers, broke the terms of the amnesty, destroyed cannon and ammunition dumps, killed all the animals, and set plantations on fire. Louverture’s Africans, on the other hand, starving and half-naked, marched into the towns, and such was their discipline that no single act of violence or pillage was committed.”

How could Louverture, genius of culture and human nature that he was, not perceive the brewing treachery? In a sense, he was like the Greek hero Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx but who couldn’t clearly see those closest to him. Louverture’s optimistic view of human potential blinded him to certain home truths.

And because Louverture trusted—all too much—that his army would trust him to act for the best, he didn’t grasp that his soldiers were restless about everything from his position on agriculture to his constant efforts to attain a diplomatic solution with France, to his rule against revenge. Louverture did not grasp the emotional power of retribution, whereas Dessalines did.

Nearly every analyst was pushing Apple to make its Mac OS operating system the company’s product. In 1997, Wired proclaimed: “Admit it. You’re out of the hardware game.” Even Apple’s cofounder, Steve Wozniak, subscribed to this view: “We had the most beautiful operating system,” he said, “but to get it you had to buy our hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake.” Steve Jobs disregarded that advice. In fact, one of his first acts as CEO was to stop licensing Mac OS to other hardware providers.