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.

Our aim here is to be better, not perfect.

Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. It’s what you do. What you do is who you are.

trust is fundamental to running any large organization. Without trust, communication breaks. Here’s why: In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

A culture is a set of actions. By requiring thoughtful action before every meeting, Amazon moves its culture in the right direction every day.

What you measure is what you value.

Spelling out what your organization must never do is the best way to inoculate yourself against bugs that cause ethical breaches.

if you win in the wrong way, what do you actually win?

Louverture spelled out what “Do the right thing” meant: don’t pillage, don’t cheat on your wife, take responsibility for yourself, personal industry, social morality, public education, religious toleration, free trade, civic pride, racial equality, and on and on. His instructions were specific, emphatic, and unceasing.

critical that leaders emphasize the “why” behind their values every chance they get, because the “why” is what gets remembered. The “what” is just another item in a giant stack of things you are supposed to do. So for Uber to merely say We do what’s right, period, means the company missed a big opportunity.

If you remember one thing, remember that ethics are about hard choices.

Bushido looks like a set of principles, but it’s a set of practices. The samurai defined culture as a code of action, a system not of values but of virtues. 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. Culturally, what you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are. Even the samurai oath is oriented toward action: I will never fall behind others in pursuing the way of the warrior. I will always be ready to serve my lord. I will honor my parents. I will serve compassionately for the benefit of others. Hagakure, the most famous collection of samurai wisdom, instructs: “The extent of one’s courage or cowardice cannot be measured in ordinary times. All is revealed when something happens.”

The most famous line in Hagakure is “The way of the warrior is to be found in dying.”

Meditating on your company’s downfall will enable you to build your culture the right way. Imagine you’ve gone bankrupt. Were you a great place to work? What was it like to do business with you? Did your encounters with people leave them better off or worse off? Did the quality of your products make you proud?

Modern companies tend to focus on metrics like goals, missions, and quarterly numbers. They rarely ask why all their employees come to work every day. Is it for the money? What’s more valuable, the money or the time? My mentor, Bill Campbell, used to say, “We are doing it for each other. How much do you care about the people you’re working with? Do you want to let them down?”

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. It wasn’t just rule-following, but a gateway to deeper intimacy.

A culture is not the sum of its outrage; it’s a set of actions. In a competitive corporate world, politeness might seem like a throwaway virtue. In fact, the way the samurai took the action-oriented nature of politeness and used it to express the abstract concepts of love and respect is exceptionally instructive.

When we started Andreessen Horowitz in 2009, the one virtue I knew I wanted in our culture was respect for the entrepreneur. Venture capitalists (VCs) depend on entrepreneurs for their existence, and I wanted our culture to reflect that. 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. I took a samurai-style approach. First, we defined the virtue thoroughly, taking pains to note what it did not mean: 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 forever. Our obligation is to the company not the founder. If the founder is no longer capable of running the company, the founder will not remain as CEO. Yet there was still an opportunity for people to misinterpret this virtue as “never saying anything negative to an entrepreneur,” so we paired it with another virtue: We tell the truth even if it hurts. When ta...

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. Avoiding the fine took practice and hard work, and embedded a number of great habits into our culture. You had to plan your previous meeting correctly, so it wouldn’t conflict with the meeting with the entrepreneur. You not only had to end that meeting with discipline, but you had to run it with discipline, so everything got done in the time allotted. You had to avoid being distracted by random texts or emails. You even had to think about when to go to the restroom.

Stories and sayings define cultures. John Morgridge, the CEO of Cisco from 1988 to 1995, wanted every spare nickel spent on the business. But as many of his employees had come from free-spending cultures, simply reminding them to be frugal didn’t get his point across. Morgridge walked the talk by staying at the Red Roof Inn, but even his example didn’t prove truly contagious. So he came up with a pithy axiom: “If you cannot see your car from your hotel room, then you are paying too much.” When his top executives heard that, they understood that business-class tickets and fancy dinners were out of the question. More subtly—but even more crucially—they understood that the point of business travel was to meet customer needs, not to enjoy perks.

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.

Oprah

“The first thing you need to know is that you cannot work off a list of questions, because if you do you won’t listen and you will miss the most important question: the follow-up question.”

Well, before I interview anyone I start by asking what their intentions are and I say, “I will help you get those intentions, but you have to trust me.” I’ll give you an example. Last week I was filming my show Super Soul Sunday and I had this guest on, Shaka Senghor, who had just spent nineteen years in prison, seven in solitary confinement for a murder he did commit. He had big muscles, dreadlocks, tattoos, and looked very scary. I asked him what his intentions were and he said, “It’s my intention to let people know that you shouldn’t be defined by the very worst thing that you have ever done in your life. People can be redeemed.” I said, “I got it and will help you get it, but you have to trust me.” So we start filming and I ask him, “When did you turn to crime?” He said, “I hit the streets when I was fourteen years old.” But I had read his book. So I said, “What about that time when you were nine years old and you came home with a perfect report card and your mother threw a pot at your head? How did that make you feel?” His body language closed up and he said, “It didn’t feel very good.” So I said, “You have to trust me. How did it make you feel?” He said, “It made me feel like nothing that I would do in life would ever matter.” I said: “You didn’t hit the streets when you were fourteen. You hit the streets when you were nine.” And we both started crying.

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.

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 Shaka Senghor experienced on his first day out of quarantine transformed him. The relevant question is, 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.) Don’t just blindly adopt it. 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 important in the decision-making process as the top executives. If you’re in fast food, Intel’s culture probably won’t work for you.

If you’re a leader, how do you know what your culture is? The question is harder than it sounds.

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?”

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. What behaviors will be rewarded? Which ones will be discouraged or severely punished? People’s receptivity when they join, and the lasting impact of first impressions, is why the new-employee process is the most important one to get right. 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.

A leader must believe in his own code. Embedding cultural elements you don’t subscribe to will eventually cause a cultural collapse.

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.

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.

The way you treat that partner will eventually be the way your employees treat each other. As Senghor points out, culture travels.

(As the samurai realized, virtues are superior to values, but until that understanding becomes widespread, a lot of companies will continue to have values.)

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.

When Senghor decided to dramatically redirect the Melanics, he did it through urgent emphasis in daily meetings. This is one of the best ways to change culture in a company.

“Where’s my money?”

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

Inclusion in the Modern World

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.”

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.

They had a McDonald’s guy call me who had been an engineer at Bell Labs. He said, “What do you have to lose by coming in to talk?” It was a lesson for me. Now I say, “Don’t turn down anything except your collar.”

Recognizing that it was the jobs that he took after he decided to quit that prepared him most to be CEO, Thompson drew two lessons on how to succeed as a minority: 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.

After creating the Inclusion Network, Thompson took all the network leaders on a retreat. On that retreat, he tried to pass on a lesson that Genghis Khan had learned and exploited nearly a thousand years earlier. Don’t see me as a bastard or a black bone. See me as a first-class citizen and I will help you conquer the world.

Most of all, they wanted to be valued. That’s what inclusion needs to be about.

“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.

There were three keys to 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.

As a result, while hiring numbers show progress, the real story lies in employee satisfaction numbers and the attrition rate of new hires. The first will be low, the second high.