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

by Ben Horowitz

Meditating on your company’s downfall will enable you to build your culture the right way. Imagine you’ve gone bankrupt. Were you a great place to work? What was it like to do business with you? Did your encounters with people leave them better off or worse off? Did the quality of your products make you proud?

Any time you decide one group is inherently good or bad regardless of their behavior, you program dishonesty into your organization.

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

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.

“The first thing you need to know is that you cannot work off a list of questions, because if you do you won’t listen and you will miss the most important question: the follow-up question.”

“I need to know how you ask people really aggressive questions and, instead of getting defensive, they open up and start crying.”

So we start filming and I ask him, “When did you turn to crime?” He said, “I hit the streets when I was fourteen years old.” But I had read his book. So I said, “What about that time when you were nine years old and you came home with a perfect report card and your mother threw a pot at your head? How did that make you feel?” His body language closed up and he said, “It didn’t feel very good.” So I said, “You have to trust me. How did it make you feel?” He said, “It made me feel like nothing that I would do in life would ever matter.” I said: “You didn’t hit the streets when you were fourteen. You hit the streets when you were nine.” And we both started crying.

If you handle external matters this way, people in your organization will look at that as a model. If you don’t, then the way you treat outsiders will leak back into your own organization.

Culture is weird like that. Because it’s a consequence of actions rather than beliefs, it almost never ends up exactly as you intend it. This is why it’s not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. You must constantly examine and reshape your culture or it won’t be your culture at all. Senghor was beginning to confront that classic problem.

The episode changed Senghor as much as it changed his squad. As a leader, you can float along in a morally ambiguous frame of mind until you face a clarifying choice. Then you either evolve or you wall yourself up in moral corruption.

Because I had maxed out what-the-fuck-you-can-become as a savage in prison, the guys knew I had nothing to gain from this—that I only wanted to make them better human beings. Now I see guys who are home and who benefited from that experience. They are thriving and living their lives the right way. That feels so much better.

Once he realized he had to make significant changes, Senghor knew that he had to align his team more tightly. He used one of the best techniques for changing a culture—constant contact. By requiring his team to eat together, work out together, and study together, he made them constantly aware of the cultural changes he was making. Nothing signals the importance of an issue like daily meetings about it.

That’s the power of culture. If you want to change who you are, you have to change the culture you’re in. Fortunately for the world he did. What he did is who he is.

Culture is an abstract set of principles that lives—or dies—by the concrete decisions the people in your organization make.

What behaviors get them included in, or excluded from, the power base? What gets them ahead?

You may be adopting an organizing principle you don’t understand. For example, Intel created a casual-dress standard to promote meritocracy. Its leaders believed the best idea should win, not the idea from the highest-ranking person in the fanciest suit. Many current Silicon Valley companies don’t know that history, and adopt the casual dress without adopting the meritocracy that underpinned it.

If you’re in fast food, Intel’s culture probably won’t work for you.

The best way to understand your culture is not through what managers tell you, but through how new employees behave. What behaviors do they perceive will help them fit in, survive, and succeed? That’s your company’s culture. Go around your managers to ask new employees these questions directly after their first week. And make sure you ask them for the bad stuff, the practices or assumptions that made them wary and uncomfortable. Ask them what’s different than other places they’ve worked—not just what’s better, but what’s worse. And ask them for advice: “If you were me, how would you improve the culture based on your first week here? What would you try to enhance?”

The truth is that what people do at the office, 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 throughout the company. If profanity is rampant, most employees will take that home, too.

Just as Africans in Saint-Domingue became the products of slave culture and then transformed into elite soldiers under Toussaint Louverture, people become the culture they live in and do what they have to do to survive and thrive.

Then Jordan Breslow, my general counsel, came by and said, “Ben, this whole discussion is making me very uncomfortable.” I said, “Jordan, why? We’re not saying anything that’s not true, and if we miss the bookings number, that might lead to a blizzard of bad press followed by customers not trusting us and us missing another quarter and being forced to do a layoff.” He said, “Yes, but we are proposing to tell the truth in such a way that what people hear is not true.” I thought: Oh no, he’s right.

I had to change in order for us to change our culture from telling the truth to making sure people heard the truth.

Simply saying something you feel more or less comfortable terming “the truth” doesn’t build trust. What builds trust is the bona fide truth being heard.

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

If you have a crisis situation and you need the team to execute, meet with them every day and even twice a day if necessary. That will show them this is a top priority. At the beginning of each meeting you say, “Where’s my money?” They will start making excuses like “Boo Boo was supposed to call me and didn’t,” or “The system didn’t tell me the right thing.” Those excuses are the key, because that’s the knowledge you’re missing. Once you know that the excuse is that “Fred didn’t answer my email,” you can tell Fred to answer the damned email and also tell the person making the excuse that you expect way more persistence. The meetings will start out running long, but two weeks later they’ll be short, because when you say, “Where’s my money?” they are going to want to say, “Right here, Lea!”

To change a culture, you can’t just give lip service to what you want. Your people must feel the urgency of it.

In later life, he would judge others primarily by their actions toward him and not according to their kinship bonds, a revolutionary concept in steppe society.”

As we shall see, judging others primarily by their actions is also a revolutionary concept in many of today’s corporate cultures.

The self-help guru Tony Robbins says the quality of your life is a function of the quality of questions you ask yourself. 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. But if you ask, “How can I use my vast resources to get into the best shape of my life?” your brain will say, “I will eat the highest-quality healthy food, work out like a professional athlete, and live to be one hundred and twenty.”

“Everyone is looking at me and they have no idea of the experience that is about to hit them in the face called Don Thompson. I’m going to go and talk to them and they will learn about me and I will learn about them and we might even strike up a wonderful friendship that leads to a long-lasting business relationship.”

You must reset your framework to thinking that you’re bringing the new stuff, the good stuff, the stuff they don’t have.

He said, “What do you have to lose by coming in to talk?” It was a lesson for me. Now I say, “Don’t turn down anything except your collar.”

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

Don’t turn down anything except your collar. Opportunities can come from anywhere. You ask an electrical engineer to design the thermal system on the french fryer. Then you ask me to carry flip charts to facilitate strategic planning. I had many reasons to refuse all the opportunities that led to me becoming CEO.

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. He did not assume that every person with a particular background could do the job that people with similar backgrounds had done—that all Chinese officials would make great administrators.

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.

If the key to inclusion means seeing someone for who they are even if they come in a color or gender that you’re not used to, then it follows that hiring people on the basis of color or gender will actually defeat your inclusion program. You won’t see the person, you will just see the package.

If a man does it, then he runs a strong chance that he’ll only see that she’s a woman and not who she really is. Because most advisors on inclusion come from the groups being included, they often miss this point. And this is why hiring women and minorities into senior positions usually accelerates your inclusion efforts.

This interview revealed a key to leadership: you must be yourself. 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.

If you try to be someone else, not only will you be unable to lead, but you’ll be ashamed to have people emulate you. In essence, Charles Barkley was saying, “Don’t follow me. Even I don’t like me.”

If you follow the first rule of leadership, not everybody will like you.

If you want to create strategic advantage by being the fastest-innovating company in the world, then Facebook’s original motto, “Move fast and break things,” makes perfect sense. If you are Airbus, making airplanes, it might not be such a good idea. Pick the virtues that will help your company accomplish its mission.

Experienced salespeople like to say, “Buyers are liars.” That’s because, for a variety of reasons, buyers do not volunteer the truth.

In sales, if you take what you’re told at face value, you won’t last.

Having their questions answered with questions drives engineers insane. They want answers fast, so they can get back to work. But if they hope to see their product succeed—if they want great salespeople to go sell it, so they can keep working for a company that’s still in business—they need to be able to tolerate that cultural difference.

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-oriented forms of compensation. Salespeople represent the company to the outside world, so they need to dress accordingly and show up early, when their customers punch in. Great sales cultures are competitive, aggressive, and highly compensated—but only for results.

Making your virtues precisely the qualities you’re looking for in an employee reinforces an important concept from bushido: virtues must be based on actions rather than beliefs.

you hire for what people can do, on the other hand, you can find out through reference checks if they’ve done it in the past, and you can even test for it in the interview.

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.

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.