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

by Ben Horowitz

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.

trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions at all, because I know that whatever you are doing is in my best interests. On the other hand, if I don’t trust you in the slightest, then no amount of talking, explaining, or reasoning will have any effect on me, because I will never believe you are telling me the truth and acting in my best interests.

If a company expects its people to behave ethically without giving them detailed instructions on what that behavior looks like and how to pursue it, the company will fall far short no matter whom it hires.

It must be memorable. If people forget the rule, they forget the culture. It must raise the question “Why?” Your rule should be so bizarre and shocking that everybody who hears it is compelled to ask, “Are you serious?” Its cultural impact must be straightforward. The answer to the “Why?” must clearly explain the cultural concept.

People must encounter the rule almost daily. If your incredibly memorable rule applies only to situations people face once a year, it’s irrelevant.

The challenge was getting into a new business with the intention of making it the business. Almost no companies did that. Netflix’s entire high-customer-satisfaction, very-profitable culture was built around delivering DVDs.

The problem was that the mind-set implicit in such values as Meritocracy and Toe-Stepping, Winning: Champions Mindset, Always Be Hustlin’, and The Best Idea Wins elevated one value above all: competitiveness. Kalanick was one of the most competitive people in the world and he drove that ethos into his company in every way possible.

Why can’t you pillage? Because pillaging would corrupt the real goal, which isn’t winning, but liberty. In other words, if you win in the wrong way, what do you actually win? If you fight in a manner that strips liberty from bystanders, how will you ever build a free society? And if you don’t build a free society, what are you fighting for?

A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody.

If you’ve already accepted the worst possible outcome, you have nothing to lose.

Whether your aim is to keep death in mind, to do it for each other, or some analogous formulation, the glue that binds a company culture is that the work must be meaningful for its own sake.

But your individual reputation and honor should mean something within your company, and be at stake in everything you do.

Though the specific rules may seem arbitrary, they were rooted in the belief that politeness is the most profound way to express love and respect for others.

To cement this practice in our culture, we focused not on the value of respect, but on the virtue of being on time. If you were late for a meeting with an entrepreneur, you had to pay a fine of ten dollars per minute.

“If you cannot see your car from your hotel room, then you are paying too much.”

Once people realized that killing the snake was much more important than how we killed it, our new culture unleashed a flurry of creative energy.

First impressions of a culture are difficult to reverse. This is why new-employee orientation is better thought of as new-employee cultural orientation.

Anyone could have added enemy soldiers into his army—everyone from the Romans on had—but Genghis’s stroke of brilliance was treating those soldiers so well that they became more loyal to him than to their original leaders.

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,

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.

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. She will ask herself, “Why are they asking about that feature? Which competitor has that feature? Hmm, then they must be in the account trying to take my deal. I need more information.”

The most important element of any corporate culture is that people care. They care about the quality of their work, they care about the mission, they care about being good citizens, they care about the company winning.

But this maniacal cultural focus on customers led the company to ignore Apple’s iPhone. Why? Because RIM was confident in its incumbency. When the iPhone first appeared it had a lousy battery, a ridiculous keyboard, was integrated into zero IT systems, and had laughable controls for IT to manage security. Who’d want that? That dismissal—that failure of imagination, of cultural flexibility—has shrunk the market cap of BlackBerry Ltd., as the company is now called, from $83 billion to $5 billion.

When I heard about a problem, I tried to seem ecstatic. I’d say, “Isn’t it great we found out about this before it killed us?” Or, “This is going to make the company so much stronger once we solve it.” People take their cues from the leader, so if you’re okay with bad news, they’ll be okay, too. Good CEOs run toward the pain and the darkness; eventually they even learn to enjoy it.