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

by Ben Horowitz

Fairchild Camera, based in New York City, did business the east coast way, which had become the way big businesses across the country conducted themselves. Fairchild’s owner, Sherman Fairchild, lived in a glass-and-marble town house in Manhattan. His top executives got cars and drivers and reserved parking places. As Tom Wolfe observed in his 1983 Esquire story “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” “Corporations in the East adopted a feudal approach to organization, without even being aware of it. There were kings and lords, and there were vassals, soldiers, yeomen, and serfs.” Bob Noyce didn’t believe any of that made sense when it was his individual engineers—the yeomen—who were inventing products and driving the business. So Fairchild Semiconductor did things differently. Everyone was expected at work by 8 a.m., and whoever got in first got the best parking space. The company’s building in San Jose was a warehouse filled with cubicles, and nobody wore a suit. Noyce didn’t hire professional managers. He said, “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.” This created a new culture, a culture of empowerment: everyone was in charge and Noyce was there to help. If a researcher had an idea, he could pursue it for a year before anyone would start inquiring about results. Employees who got a taste of Noyce’s culture of independence split off to start their own companies, including Ra...