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

by Ben Horowitz

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

He conquered more than twice as much land as anyone else, and he did it in a series of astonishing campaigns. He subdued some twelve million square miles—an area roughly the size of Africa,

By converting his army from a genetic hierarchy to a true meritocracy, Genghis Khan rid himself of the idlers and mediocrities who rule in an aristocracy, raised the army’s talent level considerably, and inspired ambitious soldiers to dream that if they proved courageous and intelligent, they, too, could lead.

the quality of your life is a function of the quality of questions you ask yourself.

A meeting is a game. I’m trying to figure you out and you’re trying to figure me out. Can we be partners, can we be assets to each other, or are we going to be enemies? If you start the game thinking everyone in the room is your enemy, you’ve already lost. You must reset your framework to thinking that you’re bringing the new stuff, the good stuff, the stuff they don’t have.

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

Don’t turn down anything except your collar.

I believe that work gets done through the go-to people.

As she put together her strategy, they—not the top executives—were the ones she consulted. She asked the employees

He did not assume that every person with a particular background could do the job that people with similar backgrounds had done—that

inclusion means seeing someone for who they are even if they come in a color or gender that you’re not used to,

hiring women and minorities into senior positions usually accelerates your inclusion efforts.

It all started with the hiring profile. People understand their own strengths, value them highly, and know how to test for them in an interview.

People who come from different backgrounds and cultures bring different skills, different communication styles, and different mores to the organization.

helpful people want to talk much more about the interviewer than about themselves:

when we tested for the ability to create a relationship,

We’d look for it by seeing how candidates built relationships with us during the interview—after interviewing someone, did you want to spend more time with him?

If you’re having trouble seeing the value in a particular talent pool, the answer is not to set up a parallel talent process for those groups; the answer is to fix the talent process you have so you can cure your blindness. I

Like many companies, our recruiting networks emanated from our employees. So we had to broaden our talent network.

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 and make suggestions about what they would hire for and how they would test for those qualities.

one criterion

when hiring a man...

is the ability to give...

It’s easy to value the things that you test for in an interview and nearly impossible to value things that you don’t.

The first step in getting the culture you want is knowing what you want.

Whether your company is a startup or a hundred years old, designing your culture is always relevant. Cultures, like the organizations that create them, must evolve to meet new challenges.

The point is not to be perfect, just better than you were yesterday.

don’t try to adapt another organization’s ways. For your culture to be vibrant and sustainable, it must come from the blood, from the soul.

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.

Say that an excellent coworker, Stan, gets his first promotion to manager. All his colleagues are excited. But then Stan becomes “Manager Stan”—and magically transforms into a dick. Because he feels he has to establish his authority, he stops treating you like a person and starts treating you like someone he has to impress with his power. Nobody likes or respects Manager Stan.

If you aren’t yourself, even you won’t follow you.

Think carefully about what your flaws are, because you don’t want to program them into your culture—or

willingness to engage in endless, unstructured conversation.

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.

The company still suffered from my inefficient personal style, but we were mostly able to work around it.

A company’s culture needs to reflect the leader’s sensibilities.

If the expressed culture goes one way but you walk in the opposite direction, the company will follow you, not your so-called culture.

Not every virtue fits every strategy.

Pick the virtues that will help your company accomplish its mission.

As a salesperson, you must know the truth.

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

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.

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

designing your culture is

to specify the kinds of employees you want.

Making your virtues precisely the qualities you’re looking for in an employee reinforces an important concept from bushido: virtues must b...

your hiring profile a big part of how you define your culture

who you hire determines your culture more than anything else.

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