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the most dangerous bugs are the ones that cause ethical breaches.
Spelling out what your organization must never do is the best way to inoculate yourself against bugs that cause ethical breaches.
When it comes to ethics, you have to explain the “why.”
Louverture treated an army of illiterate former slaves as if they were philosophers, and they rose to the challenge.
His instructions were specific, emphatic, and unceasing.
It’s also critical that leaders emphasize the “why” behind their values every chance they get, because the “why” is what gets remembered.
ethics are about hard choices.
Bushido’s dictates were crisp, coherent, and comprehensive.
A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody.
The reason so many efforts to establish “corporate values” are basically worthless is that they emphasize beliefs instead of actions.
“The extent of one’s courage or cowardice cannot be measured in ordinary times. All is revealed when something happens.”
they can’t kill you if you’re already dead. If you’ve already accepted the worst possible outcome, you have nothing to lose.
the glue that binds a company culture is that the work must be meaningful for its own sake.
Rectitude or justice, courage, honor, loyalty, benevolence, politeness, self-control, and veracity or sincerity.
The samurai regarded honor as the immortal part of themselves. Without honor, every other virtue was worthless and bestial.
your individual reputation and honor should mean something within your company, and be at stake in everything you do. Does the integrity of that deal meet your standard? Does the quality of your team’s work measure up? Are you willing to put your name on it?
The samurai combined the virtue of politeness with the virtue of veracity or sincerity. Specifically, they defined politeness without veracity as an empty gesture.
Lying to be polite is politeness without form and has no value.
a samurai’s word was considered the truth and written agreements were deemed unnecessary.
Words were seen as sacred.
The systemic problem was that as entrepreneurs asked venture capitalists for funding, VCs tended to see themselves as in the commanding role. Many carried themselves accordingly.
We respect the intense struggle of the entrepreneurial process and we know that without the entrepreneurs we have no business. When dealing with entrepreneurs, we always show up on time and we always get back to them timely and with substantive feedback, even if it’s bad news (like a rejection). We have an optimistic view of the future and believe that entrepreneurs, whether they succeed or fail, are working to help us achieve a better future. As a result, we never publicly criticize any entrepreneur or startup (doing so is a fireable offense). This does not mean that we leave CEOs in place
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We tell the truth even if it hurts. When talking to an entrepreneur, an LP [limited partner], a partner, or each other, we strive to tell the truth. We are open and honest. We do not withhold material information or tell half truths. Even if the truth will be difficult to hear or to say, we err on the side of truth in the face of difficult consequences. We do not, however, dwell on trivial truths with the intention of hurting people’s feelings or making them look bad. We tell the truth to make people better not worse.
If you were late for a meeting with an entrepreneur, you had to pay a fine of ten dollars per minute.
Other VCs as well as the people covering the industry misinterpreted the virtue and referred to it as “founder friendly,” a massive corruption of the concept that has delivered us a competitive advantage for years. Being “founder friendly” implies that you take the founder’s side even when he is mistaken. This kind of “virtue” helps nobody. In fact, it creates a culture of lies.
for a tough call like that, it won’t be totally clear what your employees should do when they come to one—and tough calls are what define a company and a culture.
everyone wanted to weigh in on every decision and then, if they lost, to revisit the decision as often as possible. We couldn’t get any work done because we were unwilling to commit the flag and move on.
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.
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.
If you want to change who you are, you have to change the culture you’re in.
Culture is an abstract set of principles that lives—or dies—by the concrete decisions the people in your organization make.
What must employees do to survive and succeed in your organization? What behaviors get them included in, or excluded from, the power base? What gets them ahead?
All leaders get surprised by feedback like “Our culture is really harsh” or “We’re arrogant,” but when they try to examine it directly to figure out what’s going on, they fall prey to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Management. The act of trying to measure your culture changes the result.
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.
First impressions of a culture are difficult to reverse. This is why new-employee orientation is better thought of as new-employee cultural orientation. Cultural orientation is your chance to make clear the culture you want and how you intend to get it.
If your company’s process for recruiting, interviewing, orienting, training, and integrating new employees is intentional and systematic, great. If any part of it is accidental, then so is your culture.
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.
people become the culture they live in and do what they have to do to survive and thrive.
Embedding cultural elements you don’t subscribe to will eventually cause a cultural collapse.
if you don’t complete all your written performance reviews, nobody who works for you will receive their raises, bonuses, or stock-option increases.
Believing in your own principles is necessary, but not sufficient.
If you are charismatic enough, you can sometimes get away with saying your culture is something it isn’t. People will believe you, at least for a while. But you won’t get the behaviors you need and you’ll never become who you said you were.
Cultural behaviors, once absorbed, get deployed everywhere.
The way you treat that partner will eventually be the way your employees treat each other.
Collaborative people know that their success is limited by uncollaborative people, so they are either going to help those people raise their game or they are going to get rid of them.
Business leaders face the same challenges, but often assume that they are “good people” and ignore their own shortcomings. This produces dangerous cultural consequences.
I was willing to be deceptive as long as I could claim that we had followed the letter of the law—and therefore been truthful.
Trust, as I discussed in the Louverture chapter, is the foundation of communication.
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.
