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

by Ben Horowitz

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

The pattern was clear. Every organization tended to resemble the person in charge.

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.

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.

Next, we changed our hiring process. 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. For example, one criterion men often overlook when hiring a manager—but women rarely do—is the ability to give feedback. Women are more willing to confront a coworker and have a difficult conversation; men often avoid the issue until it gets superhot. We also made sure that our interview teams came from a range of backgrounds, so that we were better able to see the complete candidate.

Design Your Culture

A few points to keep in mind:

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.

Step one in designing a successful culture is to be yourself.

If you follow the first rule of leadership, not everybody will like you. But trying to get everybody to like you makes things even worse. I know this, because not everybody likes me.

But Know Which Parts of You Need Work

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. One part of my personality that didn’t work so well in a software company was my willingness to engage in endless, unstructured conversation.

When Dick Costolo took over as CEO of Twitter, his advisor Bill Campbell joked that if you set off a bomb at 5 p.m., only the cleaning people would get killed. Costolo wanted to change the culture to encourage hard work. Costolo himself is a grinder. After having dinner with his family every night, he’d go back to work and make himself available to anyone who was still there and who wanted to get something done that needed his help. Pretty soon, a lot of people were working longer hours and getting more done. If Costolo wasn’t the type of person who could focus and be effective for very long hours, his plan never would have worked. It is much easier to walk the talk when the talk is your natural chatter.

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

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.

When Jeff Bezos created Amazon’s long-term strategy, a key element was a lower cost structure. So a cultural attentiveness to frugality made perfect sense. For a company like Apple, whose strategy depended on building the most beautiful, perfectly designed products in the world, frugality would have been counterproductive. In fact, John Scully nearly destroyed the company when he fired Steve Jobs for, in part, his lack of cost consciousness. Not every virtue fits every strategy. If you want to create strategic advantage by being the fastest-innovating company in the world, then Facebook’s original motto, “Move fast and break things,” makes perfect sense. If you are Airbus, making airplanes, it might not be such a good idea. Pick the virtues that will help your company accomplish its mission.

Great engineers love to build things and often code on side projects as a hobby. So creating a comfortable environment that encourages round-the-clock programming is vital.

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

What virtues do you value most in employees? 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.

He said that when he was recruiting he looked for people who were smart, humble, hardworking, and collaborative.

I began looking for these four: Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning.

Intellectual curiosity