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

by Ben Horowitz

Still, what Raymond said kept bothering me. I was expecting sympathy and all I got from him was strength. It kind of shocked me out of my own b.s.

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.

Don’t attend pity parties. And definitely don’t host them.

Don’t turn down anything except your collar. Opportunities can come from anywhere.

So I said, “You know what? We need a white male network.” They said, “Stop messing with us.” I said, “I’m serious. Are we about true diversity and inclusion or are we about black folks’ rights, Latino rights, and all that?” The point was, Do we want to see people for who they are and get the best of everyone or do we just want to advocate for certain groups over others? So we created the first white male network. They didn’t want to call it that, of course, so we called it the Inclusion Network.

To change the dynamic, Wilderotter arbitrarily took the side of the front line over leadership in every dispute.

So I’d tell them to go down to the hardware store and buy the tools they needed and give their tech supervisor the bill. The idea was to encourage them to stop complaining and start taking ownership.

So I will focus on how you can apply Genghis Khan’s, Don Thompson’s, and Maggie Wilderotter’s principles to give your company a competitive advantage—the advantage of acquiring the best talent available.

All three understood more than just national or racial or gender diversity; they also understood cognitive and cultural diversity—people’s disparate and unique ways of processing information, thinking, and interacting with others.

inclusion: He was deeply involved in the strategy and implementation, down to having his own mother adopt children from a conquered tribe to symbolize the integration process.

He started with the job description he needed to fill, be it cavalry, doctors, scholars, or engineers, and then went after the talent to fill it.

Not only did he make sure that conquered people were treated equally, but through adoption and intermarriage, he made them kin.

Compare this to modern companies where: CEOs delegate inclusion programs to “heads of diversity.” These heads of diversity are tasked with achieving diverse representation rather than with the whole company’s success. So they often focus on achieving specific race and gender targets rather than on finding talent from diverse pools. Companies often outsource integration to hired diversity consultants who have no understanding of the company’s business objectives. That is, the companies make no further efforts to turn themselves into a great place to work for their new hires. As a result, while hiring numbers show progress, the real story lies in employee satisfaction numbers and the attrition rate of new hires. The first will be low, the second high.

Every organization tended to resemble the person in charge.

If a woman ran the company, women were overrepresented. If a Chinese-American person ran engineering, you’d find lots of Chinese-American engineers. If an Indian-American ran marketing, there’d be Indian-Americans all over the marketing department. Why?

I asked her what was in her profile that made it difficult for men to get a job in marketing. “Helpfulness,”

helpful people want to talk much more about the interviewer than about themselves: by learning about her they can anticipate her needs and be, well, helpful.

Similarly, when we tested for the ability to create a relationship, African-Americans scored higher.

When a manager wants to make a new hire, she must now have people from talent pools different from her own (for instance, U.S. military veterans, African-Americans, etc.) review the hiring criteria

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.

All cultures are aspirational.

I have worked with thousands of companies and none of them ever achieved total cultural compliance or harmony. In a company of any significant size there will always be violations.

Now the CEO is in a bind. Does he stick to his guns even though he doesn’t really believe in his idea anymore? Or does he risk looking wishy-washy by reversing himself on the spot? This is a no-win—all because he wanted to be Jack Welch. If you aren’t yourself, even you won’t follow you.

A CEO will often hear something like this from a board member: “I don’t think your CFO is as good as the CFOs of other companies whose boards I’m on.” This is an extremely tricky statement to deal with. The CEO doesn’t know those other CFOs, and she can’t interview them and compare. How does she respond? The CEO’s common—and wrong—move is to go tell her CFO to be better in front of the board. She is trying to be what the board member wants, but failing, because she has refused to have a point of view. Her CFO will be confused, because he has no idea what he’s done wrong. He will try to transform into something he’s not and also lose his leadership mojo.

The CEO should tell the board member, “Great. Let me know what you think makes those CFOs better than our guy, and please introduce me to them.” The CEO should spend time with those CFOs, decide for herself whether she comes to the same assessment of a skills gap, then—and thi...

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.

It is much easier to walk the talk when the talk is your natural chatter.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It is a great line and I love it, but I disagree with it. I love it, because it is marvelously anti-elitist: Screw what the executive suite says, what matters is what the people are doing.

But the truth is that culture and strategy do not compete.

In tech, the most pronounced difference is between sales and engineering. As an engineer, you need to know how things work. If you’re asked to build a new function for an existing product, you must understand precisely how that product works. So you often have to talk to the code’s author, who must be able to tell you exactly how she designed it and how all of its components interact. People who are abstract, nonlinear, or imprecise in their communication have difficulty fitting into engineering organizations, because they leave bugs in their wake. As a salesperson, you must know the truth. Does the customer have the necessary budget? Are you ahead of or behind the competition? Who in the target organization is a supporter and who is a detractor? 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.” Like Jack Bauer in 24 interrogating a terrorist, you must extract the truth. In sales, if you take what you’re told at face value, you won’t last. 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 salespers...

Great engineers love to build things and often code on side projects as a hobby. So creating a comfortable environment that encourages round-the-clock programming is vital. Hallmarks of engineering cultures often include casual dress, late morning arrival times, and late or very late evening departure times.

Great salespeople are more like boxers. They may enjoy what they do, but nobody sells software on the weekends for fun. Like prizefighting, selling is done for the money and the competition—no prize, no fight.

So sales organizations focus on commissions, sales contests, president’s clubs, and other prize-or...

Great sales cultures are competitive, aggressive, and highly compensated—but only for results.

Honestly, most of what ultimately defined us happened in the hiring of the first twenty people. 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.

He said that when he was recruiting he looked for people who were smart, humble, hardworking, and collaborative. That’s what we needed. Those four are especially valuable in combination, because if you have just two of the four it can be a disaster.

Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity.

“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?”

Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity ...

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.

Collaborative. It’s not submissive, not deferential—in fact it’s kind of the opposite. In our culture, being collaborative means ...

Once you have your specification for employees clearly established, how do you apply it?

Amazon selected people to serve as the Bar Raiser. Their function in interviews is to test candidates on their ability to understand Amazon’s leadership principles and fit into its culture. Crucially, the person who is the Bar Raiser is not on the hiring team and has no vested interest in the candidate—his

“Well, it started with the interview. I walked into the interview with the senior vice president of sales, John McMahon. He said nothing for what seemed like five minutes, then asked me, ‘What would you do if I punched you in the face right now?’” At this point in Mark’s story, I cried, “What!? He wanted to know what you would do if he punched you in the face? That’s crazy. What did you say?” Mark said, “I asked him, ‘Are you testing my intelligence or my courage?’ And McMahon said, ‘Both.’ So I said, ‘Well, you’d better knock me out.’ He said, ‘You’re hired.’ Right then I knew that I’d found a home.”

That brief exchange enabled him to suss out whether Mark was a fit with his key cultural elements: the ability to keep your poise under fire, the ability to listen carefully, the courage to discover why a question is being asked—and, most of all, competitiveness.

The most important element of any corporate culture is that people care.

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.

Is your virtue actionable?