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

by Ben Horowitz

Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.

Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.

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

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.

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

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.

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

If somebody behaves in a way you can’t believe, remember that your culture somehow made that acceptable.

So it’s critical to a healthy culture that whatever your decision-making process, you insist on a strict rule of disagree and commit. If you are a manager, at any level, you have a fundamental responsibility to support every decision that gets made. You can disagree in the meeting, but afterward you must not only support the final decision, you must be able to compellingly articulate the reasons the decision was made.

Culture begins with deciding what you value most. Then you must help everyone in your organization practice behaviors that reflect those virtues.