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

by Ben Horowitz

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

Is that phone call so important I need to return it today, or can it wait till tomorrow? Can I ask for a raise before my annual review? Is the quality of this document good enough or should I keep working on it?

Do I have to be on time for that meeting? Should I stay at the Four Seasons or the Red Roof Inn? When I negotiate this contract, what’s more important: the price or the partnership? Should I point out what my peers do wrong, or what they do right? Should I go home at 5 p.m. or 8 p.m.? How hard do I need to study the competition? Should we discuss the color of this new product for five minutes or thirty hours? If I know something is badly broken in the company, should I say something? Whom should I tell? Is winning more important than ethics?

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.

“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.

If a researcher had an idea, he could pursue it for a year before anyone would start inquiring about results.

Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.

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 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.

Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe.

It’s what you do. What you do is who you are.

In any human interaction, the

required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

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.

No culture can flourish without the enthusiastic participation of its leader.

He charged at his troops’ head, something Europe had rarely seen from a leader since Alexander the Great, and was wounded seventeen times.

Louverture began building trust by being trustworthy himself.

Because the culture he wanted was a straight reflection of his own values, Louverture walked the talk better than most.

A culture is not the sum of its outrage; it’s a set of actions.

“Sincerity is the end and the beginning of all things; without Sincerity there would be nothing.”

But then, as I did research on Africa, I took the name Shaka Senghor, from the great warrior Shaka Zulu and from Léopold Senghor, the Senegalese poet and cultural theorist who served as the first president of Senegal.

If you’re not honoring the culture yourself, nobody fucking believes you.

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.

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.

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

The Mongols said about the Great Khan that “If he sends me into fire or water I go. I go for him.”

He said that when he was recruiting he looked for people who were smart, humble, hardworking, and collaborative.

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.

If you manage a reasonably large organization, you can be absolutely sure of one thing: at any given moment, something somewhere has gone terribly wrong.

Culture begins with deciding what you value most.