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

Identifying the culture you want is hard: you have to figure out not only where your company is trying to go, but the road it should take to get there.

Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.

“Coaching, and not direction, is the first quality of leadership now. Get the barriers out of the way to let people do the things they do well.”

Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.

The samurai called their principles “virtues” rather than “values”; virtues are what you do, while values are merely what you believe.

Companies—just like gangs, armies, and nations—are large organizations that rise or fall because of the daily microbehaviors of the human beings that compose them.

Culture only works if the leader visibly participates in and vocally champions it.

Culture isn’t a magical set of rules that makes everyone behave the way you’d like. It’s a system of behaviors that you hope most people will follow, most of the time.

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. This book aims to help you do the things you need to do so you can be who you want to be.

The secret to finding a breakthrough idea, as Peter Thiel says, is that you have to believe something that nobody else does.

Keep What Works

Create Shocking Rules

I must believe there will be a bigger payoff from the relationship in the future than whatever I can get by betraying you now. If I believe there is no tomorrow, then there can be no trust.

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

When everyone wants to know “Why?” in an organization, the answer programs the culture, because it’s an answer everyone will remember.

Dress for Success

It was a constant reminder of who they were and what they might achieve.

Incorporate Outside Leadership

Building a great culture means adapting it to circumstances. And that often means bringing in outside leadership from the culture you need to penetrate or master.

Make Decisions That Demonstrate Cultural Priorities

The more counterintuitive the leader’s decision, the stronger the i...

Walk the Talk

No culture can flourish without the enthusiastic participation of its leader.

For a culture to stick, it must reflect the leader’s actual values, not just those he thinks sound inspiring. Because a leader creates culture chiefly by his actions—by example.

Make Ethics Explicit

because integrity is often at odds with other goals that it must be clearly and specifically inserted into the culture.

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”