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

by Ben Horowitz

All three understood more than just national or racial or gender diversity; they also understood cognitive and cultural diversity—people’s disparate and unique ways of processing information, thinking, and interacting with others. By seeing people for who they were they could see what they truly had to offer.

Genghis Khan’s approach to inclusion: He was deeply involved in the strategy and implementation, down to having his own mother adopt children from a conquered tribe to symbolize the integration process. He started with the job description he needed to fill, be it cavalry, doctors, scholars, or engineers, and then went after the talent to fill it. He did not assume that every person with a particular background could do the job that people with similar backgrounds had done—that all Chinese officials would make great administrators. Not only did he make sure that conquered people were treated equally, but through adoption and intermarriage, he made them kin. They weren’t brought into the empire under some separate but supposedly equal side program. As a result, they felt truly equal—and became more loyal to him and to the Mongols than to their original clans.

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. All cultures are aspirational. I have worked with thousands of companies and none of them ever achieved total cultural compliance or harmony. In a company of any significant size there will always be violations. The point is not to be perfect, just better than you were yesterday. While you can draw inspiration from other cultures, 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.

This interview revealed a 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. If you try to be someone else, not only will you be unable to lead, but you’ll be ashamed to have people emulate you. In essence, Charles Barkley was saying, “Don’t follow me. Even I don’t like me.”

The CEO should spend time with those CFOs, decide for herself whether she comes to the same assessment of a skills gap, then—and this step is critical—decide how important those skills are for her company. If the skills are vital and the difference in skills between her CFO and the external CFOs is real, she can go back to her CFO, tell him where he stands, and let him know that he’s not going to make it. She can be herself. If she disagrees with the board member, she can be herself with him, too. And she’ll have done the work to back up her response.

There are parts of any CEO’s personality that he doesn’t actually want in the company. Think carefully about what your flaws are, because you don’t want to program them into your culture—or else leading by example will bite you in the ass.

I learned to counterprogram the culture against my inclinations in three ways: I surrounded myself with people who had the opposite personality trait. They wanted to finish the conversation as soon as possible and move on to the next thing. 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. I announced to the company that we were committed to running meetings efficiently—talking the talk that I did not like walking, and forcing myself to walk it as much as I could. The company still suffered from my inefficient personal style, but we were mostly able to work around it.

Once you’re comfortable with who you are, you can begin to map that identity onto the culture you want.

The management consultant Peter Drucker famously said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It is a great line and I love it, but I disagree with it. I love it, because it is marvelously anti-elitist: Screw what the executive suite says, what matters is what the people are doing. That’s totally correct. I also love that Drucker’s observation elevates culture to a high-order consideration. But the truth is that culture and strategy do not compete. Neither eats the other. Indeed, for either to be effective, they must cohere.

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

In tech, the most pronounced difference is between sales and engineering. As an engineer, you need to know how things work. If you’re asked to build a new function for an existing product, you must understand precisely how that product works. So you often have to talk to the code’s author, who must be able to tell you exactly how she designed it and how all of its components interact. People who are abstract, nonlinear, or imprecise in their communication have difficulty fitting into engineering organizations, because they leave bugs in their wake.

When you ask an engineer a question, her instinct is to answer it with great precision. When you ask a salesperson a question, she’ll try to figure out the question behind the question. If a customer asks, “Do you have feature X?” a good engineer will answer yes or no. A good salesperson will almost never answer that way.

Making your virtues precisely the qualities you’re looking for in an employee reinforces an important concept from bushido: virtues must be based on actions rather than beliefs.

If you hire for what people can do, on the other hand, you can find out through reference checks if they’ve done it in the past, and you can even test for it in the interview.

Patrick Collison, cofounder and CEO of Stripe, told me: Honestly, most of what ultimately defined us happened in the hiring of the first twenty people. So the question of what do you want the culture to be and who do you want to hire are in some sense the same question.

Our values were really original—they included playfulness and solidarity, for instance—but they weren’t an effective guide to action. We were trying to find something that would help people make a decision.

Suresh Khanna, who led sales at AdRoll. One thing he said really stuck with me. He said that when he was recruiting he looked for people who were smart, humble, hardworking, and collaborative.