What You Do Is Who You Are: An expert guide to building your company’s culture

by Ben Horowitz

On the other hand, pushing decision making too far down the organization can cause several problems: It can break communication across product groups. This results in a frustrating customer experience. For years, nearly every Google product had its own customer profile: I might be BenH on gmail, but I couldn’t seamlessly log in as BenH on YouTube. This led to a fractured experience for customers and prevented Google from understanding user behavior across its product lines. (Larry Page finally forced his groups to prioritize a common customer profile.) It can break communication between divisions. Which can lead to a company making great products that it has no capability to market or sell. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) famously spawned a dizzying array of technological breakthroughs, including the Graphical User Interface, but it could never bring them to market effectively, because the rest of the company didn’t understand what they were up to. Eventually, Xerox realized this and spun PARC off as a wholly owned subsidiary. You can lose input from your very best minds. If you’re at Netflix, what decision wouldn’t benefit from Reed Hastings’s knowledge and experience?