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

by Ben Horowitz

Why did the bushido have such a profound impact on Japanese society? The complex answer is that the samurai developed and refined their culture continuously over a very long period of time, using a variety of psychologically sophisticated techniques to make it feel indelible, inescapable, and completely natural. The simple answer is that they kept death in mind at all times.

He displayed all the skills this book hopes to impart: he shaped a culture, recognized its flaws, then transformed it into something better.

When you have power, you have responsibility. It took me a long while to realize that the plays we were making affected not only me and my squad, but the whole prison environment. And that when a member left, he would carry that culture with him. First I had to learn there was a different way, then I had to master those skills, then I had to decide that was truly how I wanted to live my life. It was a three-step process, and it took me nine years to get through it. I was lucky it only took that long—due to my status, the other men didn’t try to test me, so I didn’t regress.

The Melanics’ code was complex, but it essentially made everyone responsible for his fellow members. If an outsider struck a member, the entire organization would rise against him, which meant he would not be safe in any prison. You had to come to the aid of any member in need who was a worthy brother; his beef became your beef. If a member was deemed unworthy—often because he hadn’t come to another member’s aid—he lost his protection.

Senghor focused on the following principles: Never take advantage of members. Never physically accost them. And, in general, treat them the way you’d want to be treated.

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.

Senghor had studied the culture, assimilated it, and meticulously improved it as he rose through the ranks. Once he reached the top of a gang, he was faced with a new set of choices—which prompted a profound realization. All those life-risking decisions he’d made, all those moments of serial integrity, had added up to a culture he didn’t want. 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.

I recognized my own hypocrisy when I chose to resolve conflicts by the rules of the yard as opposed to my own evolving principles. And I began to understand the different levels of how you shift an organization to be in line with your moral code.

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.

Who is Shaka Senghor? Is he a ruthless criminal and prison gang leader, or a best-selling author, leader in prison reform, and contributor to a better society? Clearly he’s capable of being both. 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.

As a leader, this gap between theory and practice poses huge challenges. How do you get an organization to behave when you’re not around to supervise? How do you make sure the behaviors that you prescribe result in the culture that you want? How can you tell what’s actually going on? How can you know if you’ve succeeded?

Your own perspective on the culture is not that relevant. Your view or your executive team’s view of your culture is rarely what your employees experience.

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?

You must start from first principles. Every ecosystem has a default culture. (In Silicon Valley, our baked-in cultural elements range from casual dress to employee owners to long hours.)

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. And the predominant culture may not fit your business. Intel ran that way because the top engineers were as i...

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. 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. 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?”

Your first day, your first week in an organization is when you’re observing each detail, figuring out where you stand. That’s when your sense of the culture gets seared in—especially if someone gets stabbed in the neck. That’s when you diagnose the power structure: Who can get things done, and why? What did they do to get in that position? Can you replicate it? At the same time, how you behave on arrival—how other people see you—affects your standing and potential in the company and determines your personal brand.

As one example, I’ve never met a CEO who doesn’t believe in the value of giving feedback. Everybody wants a transparent culture where people know where they stand. Yet I’ve met many CEOs who require managers to write performance reviews, but won’t take the time to do it themselves.

When I was CEO, I had a rule that everyone, including me, was held to: if you don’t complete all your written performance reviews, nobody who works for you will receive their raises, bonuses, or stock-option increases. We always had 100 percent compliance on written feedback, because no manager wanted to be burned at the stake by her people. Cultural consistency on feedback was that important to me.

You could also argue that my rule was self-protective: over time, a hypocritical leader becomes vulnerable to being replaced by another, more walk-the-talk leader. Believing in your own principles is necessary, but not sufficient. You must also do as Senghor did and transfer those principles to your team in a way that sticks. Depending upon where the team is to begin with, this transfer may be a relatively minor effort or an imme...

If your allegiance is to the tribe, which is the more instinctive call, keep in mind that the idea behind supporting one another when the chips are down is to foster trust and loyalty throughout the company. It’s nearly impossible for a company to be able to maintain one set of ethics with partners and an entirely different set in-house. If you support the employee, he will learn two lessons: 1) you have his back, and 2) dropping the ball is totally acceptable. The way you treat that partner will eventually be the way your employees treat each other.

As Senghor points out, culture travels.

When a few members of Senghor’s squad wanted to kill a couple of white prisoners, they were selfishly trying to manipulate the code. This move is common: Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, refers to it as “weaponizing the culture.”

Butterfield had to send a clear message about which behaviors were and were not part of the culture. So he began to shift the emphasis away from empathy and toward one of the core attributes he wanted to build into the culture: being collaborative. Then he defined what that value meant in practice. At Slack, “collaborative” means taking leadership from everywhere. 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.

Cultures tend to reflect the values of the leaders. Ultimately, Senghor had to change himself to get the culture that he wanted. 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 had to change in order for us to change our culture from telling the truth to making sure people heard the truth. This shift derived from our original cultural goal of trust. Trust, as I discussed in the Louverture chapter, is the foundation of communication. 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.

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

Genghis Khan was the most effective military leader in history. 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, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Arctic Ocean—with an army of just one hundred thousand men.

Frank McLynn writes that as an adult he was formidable: “robustly healthy, tall, broad-browed, with a long beard and eyes like a cat,” all of which “made him appear calm, ruthless, calculating and self-controlled.”

In most armies, the leaders were on horseback while everyone else was slow-moving infantry; Genghis’s army consisted entirely of cavalry, so they were all equals and they all moved fast. Most armies had large units dedicated to providing supplies; in Genghis’s army, each man carried what he needed: clothes for all weathers, flints for making fires, canteens for water and milk, files to sharpen arrowheads, a lasso for rounding up animals or prisoners, sewing needles for mending clothes, a knife and a hatchet for cutting, and a skin bag for packing it all. They all milked their animals and fed themselves from hunting and looting.

The Jin people of China were only the first to be astonished by the Mongols’ mercurial strikes: “They come as though the sky were falling, and they disappear like a flash of lightning.”

Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism. Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries.

Genghis created a remarkably stable culture by founding it on three principles: meritocracy, loyalty, and inclusion.

To solidify this new meritocracy, he made it a capital offense for his family members to become a khan, or leader, without being elected to the post. He introduced the concept of the rule of law; might alone no longer made right. At a time when rulers considered themselves above the law, Genghis Khan insisted that leaders be as accountable as the lowest herder.

Yet for a leader of his time, Genghis was remarkably down-to-earth; he walked the talk. While he expected obeisance, he never portrayed himself as godlike—indeed, he never allowed anyone to paint his portrait, sculpt his image, or engrave his name or likeness on a coin. In a letter to a Taoist monk, Genghis spoke of himself as just another soldier, saying, “I have not myself distinguished qualities,” and adding, “I continue to wear the same clothing and eat the same food as the cowherds and horse-herders. We make the same sacrifices, and we share the riches.”

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.

When the highly civilized Uighur people surrendered without a fight in 1209, Genghis deployed many of their officials throughout his realm as judges, generals, scribes, secret agents, and tax collectors. McLynn notes that this was another pivotal moment: Since their high skills, talents, and culture had been placed at the service of the Mongols, and their script accepted as the first official language of the governing class, they helped to give the empire ideological and spiritual legitimacy; it could no longer be said that this was just a congeries of cruel, bloodthirsty savages.

Still, it was an extraordinary empire while it lasted, and it was built on cultural innovation. Because he had grown up as an outcast, Genghis Khan saw what blinded other leaders in his day and indeed most leaders even today. Where they perceived only differences, only threats they would be prudent to suppress, Genghis Khan saw only talent he could use.

The self-help guru Tony Robbins says the quality of your life is a function of the quality of questions you ask yourself.

There are two ways to approach being the only black guy in the meeting. You can think, “Everyone is looking at me”—and start sliding down the slippery slope: “They don’t like me, they don’t like black people . . .” Or you can think, as I do, “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.” Unfortunately, a lot of our folks have been brainwashed to approach life in the first way. 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.

Thompson was now one of four people working on quality management at McDonald’s. The other three had the plum jobs of writing speeches for the top execs; he drew the short straw of carrying the flip charts to meetings around the globe. But this task enabled him to learn, and then to master, the complex operations of the world’s largest restaurant business. He met nearly every significant group in the company and pieced together the process flows, the subcultures of the different operating units and the relationships between them, the details of the business model—the hidden magic that made the hamburger factory hum.

“Look, I am here to help in any way I can. I’m not coming in to tell you what to do. What I can do is help you understand your performance relative to other regions and help you hit your plan.” That approach changed the whole dynamic. If you are the one guy wanting to help, then the regional managers would embrace you. Those white guys taught me all the details of how to be a regional manager, which directly led to my ascent to CEO.

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.

When Wilderotter arrived at Frontier, she told me, “Everybody wanted to show me the org chart, to make sure I understood the pecking order. I didn’t even look at it, because I believe that work gets done through the go-to people. They may not have titles and positions, but they’re the ones who get the work done.”

She went on a listening tour of the company and its far-off markets to find out how things were actually run and who those go-to people were. As she put together her strategy, they—not the top executives—were the ones she consulted. She asked the employees what they loved about the company and what they hated. Finally, she spent time thinking about how to dismantle the hierarchy and close the communications gap between the white- and blue-collar workers.

By tearing down the caste system, Wilderotter built intense loyalty among Frontier’s employees and freed them to do their best work. Her approach earned her the nickname the CEO of the People.