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

by Ben Horowitz

Many managers want to attend executive staff meetings, as it makes them feel needed and it puts them in the know. I made use of this desire by setting a price of admission to the meeting: you had to fess up to at least one thing that was “on fire.” I’d say, “I know, with great certainty, that there are things that are completely broken in our company and I want to know what they are. If you don’t know what they are, then you are of no use to me in this meeting.” This technique got me deluged in bad news, but it also created a culture where surfacing and discussing problems was not just tolerated, but encouraged. We didn’t solve all the problems that came up, but at least we knew about most of them. Sometimes just knowing about a problem we did not solve solved other problems. When I launched Opsware from the ashes of LoudCloud, I wanted to ship Opsware, the software we used to manage our cloud environment, as soon as possible. We would have to scramble to fix the inevitable bugs and issues, but the knowledge and the skills we would gain from competing in the market would be invaluable. That’s what I thought. But most of my engineers thought, Ben has lost his mind. He has no idea how far away this product is from being ready for prime time. I did not know they thought that until, during a routine conversation with one of my engineers, I asked, “What do you think we should do differently?” He said, “Nobody thinks we should ship Opsware but you.” I still thought shipping was ...