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

Бен Хоровиц

Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times bestselling author combines lessons both from history and modern organisational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help us build cultures that can weather both good and bad times. The times and circumstances in which people were raised often shape them – yet a few leaders have managed to shape their times. In this follow-up to the bestselling business classic The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz turns his attention to a question crucial to every organisation: How do you create and sustain the culture you want? This book is a journey through cultures ancient to modern, spotlighting models of leadership and culture-building from the samurai to prison gangs. Along the way, it answers fundamental questions: Who are we? How do people talk about us when we’re not around? How do we treat our customers? Can we be trusted?  Because who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in a company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do. This book will help you do the things needed to become the kind of leader you want to be – and others want to follow.

## WHAT YOU DO IS WHO YOU ARE. HOW TO CREATE YOUR BUSINESS CULTURE. Ben Horowitz


## Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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www.WilliamCollinsBooks.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Ben Horowitz 2019

Cover design by Andrew Guinn

Jacket photograph © Beowulf Sheehan

Ben Horowitz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Information on previously published material appears here.

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Source ISBN: 9780008356118

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008356132

Version: 2019-09-24

## Dedication

This is for all the people serving time who did what they did, but are now doing something positive. I see what you are doing.

I know who you are.

One hundred percent of my portion of the proceeds of this book will go to help people coming out of prison change their culture and remain free, and to the people in Haiti trying to rebuild their society and return to the glory of their past.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Introduction: What You Do Is Who You Are

1 Culture and Revolution: The Story of Toussaint Louverture

2 Toussaint Louverture Applied

3 The Way of the Warrior

4 The Warrior of a Different Way: The Story of Shaka Senghor

5 Shaka Senghor Applied

6 Genghis Khan, Master of Inclusion

7 Inclusion in the Modern World

8 Be Yourself, Design Your Culture

9 Edge Cases and Object Lessons

10 Final Thoughts

Author’s Note

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Ben Horowitz

About the Publisher

## FOREWORD. Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In the secular bible that launched the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro: An Interpretation, the indefatigable black bibliophile Arturo Schomburg argued in his essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past” that for too long “the Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture.” The Puerto Rican–born Schomburg didn’t just write about recovering this subsumed culture in white America; he recentered it by amassing one of history’s greatest collections of manuscripts, art, and rare artifacts, which eventually provided the foundation for one of the crown jewels of the New York Public Library system: Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a fortress of learning and enlightenment located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard in the heart of historic Harlem.

Almost a century later, another visionary in our midst, the Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur Ben Horowitz, has produced a fascinating volume at the intersection of business, leadership, and culture studies that rests on the same intellectual foundation as the mighty Schomburg. There is a lesson within a lesson at play in these pages. Instead of turning out one more book using winning case studies on the importance of fostering a thriving, mutually supportive workplace culture, Horowitz roots his own definition of innovation in the deliberate choices he makes to center the leadership stories of present, past, and long past people of color far outside the C-suite or open floor plans of today’s tech giants. They include Toussaint Louverture, the genius behind the only successful slave rebellion in the history of the western hemisphere, the Haitian Revolution of the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century; the samurai of Japan, whose bushido code elevated virtues above values; Genghis Khan, the ultimate outsider who led one of history’s most dominant armies by absorbing the best and brightest among those he defeated; and, perhaps most moving of all, James White, aka Shaka Senghor, who, on a devastating murder conviction, stepped out of quarantine into the belly of the Michigan prison system to become the leader of a violent squad called the Melanics that, over time, he shepherded toward a culture revolution focused on community uplift after prison.

By placing these dynamic figures at the center of his study, Horowitz underscores his own reputation as one of the tech industry’s most philosophically committed innovators—someone who defines creation not as the execution of an already good idea but as an original one that is so cutting edge that it is considered contrarian at best. Here, Horowitz is out to persuade readers to adopt his experiential view that the most robust, sustainable cultures are those based on action, not words; an alignment of personality and strategy; an honest awareness and assessment of the norms imbibed on the first day of work by new—not veteran—employees grasping at what it will take to make it; an openness to including outside talent and perspectives; a commitment to explicit ethics and principled virtues that stand out and have meaning; and, not least, a willingness to come up with “shocking rules” within an organization that indelibly and inescapably prompt others to ask, “Why?”

To prove “why” himself, Horowitz doesn’t go to the usual well of Fortune 500 winners but to the outer edges of history, where we discover leaders whose stories reveal lessons and insights that are actually core to the creation of culture itself.

In its essence, What You Do Is Who You Are is a book whose content and structure—including the epigraphs Horowitz invokes from the canon of hip-hop legends—perfectly reflect the thesis at work in its pages. It also happens to be an energetic read, with surprising and illuminating applications of the lessons of Louverture, Senghor, and company to the contemporary business and political scene that Horowitz himself, as the former CEO of LoudCloud and cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, inhabits as one of today’s most uniquely gifted leaders. In this way, Horowitz calls upon a key aspect of the African-American tradition of “signifying”—riffing as a mode of homage, a nod of admiration and respect—and he does so with penetrating insight and memorable effect. The book is also an inspiring nod to an historical tradition that intellectual antecedents such as Arturo Schomburg—caught in the throes of Jim Crow segregated America—sacrificed so much to canonize, hoping that generations hence would see “behind the veil,” as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, to mine lessons for a new, truly cosmopolitan world culture in which they could only dream of flourishing. By centering his transformational volume on culture-makers whose wisdom is found on the margins, Horowitz gives us an instant classic with the potential to redefine “what we do” and, thereby, “who we are.”

### INTRODUCTION: WHAT YOU DO IS WHO YOU ARE

Revel in being discarded, or having all your energies exhausted in vain; only those who have endured hardship will be of use. Samurai who have never erred before will never have what it takes.

—Hagakure

When I first founded a company, one called LoudCloud, I sought advice from CEOs and industry leaders. They all told me, “Pay attention to your culture. Culture is the most important thing.”

But when I asked these leaders, “What exactly is culture, and how can I affect mine?” they became extremely vague. I spent the next eighteen years trying to figure this question out. Is culture dogs at work and yoga in the break room? No, those are perks. Is it your corporate values? No, those are aspirations. Is it the personality and priorities of the CEO? That helps shape the culture, but it is far from the thing itself.

When I was the CEO of LoudCloud, I figured that our company culture would be just a reflection of my values, behaviors, and personality. So I focused all my energy on “leading by example.” To my bewilderment and horror, that method did not scale as the company grew and diversified. Our culture became a hodgepodge of different cultures fostered under different managers, and most of these cultures were unintentional. Some managers were screamers who intimidated their people, others neglected to give any feedback, some didn’t bother returning emails—it was a big mess.

I had a middle manager—I’ll call him Thorston—who I thought was pretty good. He worked in marketing and was a great storyteller (an essential marketing skill). I was shocked to find out, from overhearing casual conversations, that he was taking storytelling to another level by constantly lying about everything. Thorston was soon working elsewhere, but I knew I had to deal with a much deeper problem: because it had taken me years to find out that he was a compulsive liar, during which time he’d been promoted, it had become culturally okay to lie at LoudCloud. The object lesson had been learned. It did not matter that I never endorsed it: his getting away with it made it seem okay. How could I undo that lesson and restore our culture? I hadn’t the first clue.

To really understand how this stuff works, I knew I had to dig deeper. So I asked myself, How many of the following questions can be resolved by turning to your corporate goals or mission statement?

> Is that phone call so important I need to return it today, or can it wait till tomorrow?

> Can I ask for a raise before my annual review?

> Is the quality of this document good enough or should I keep working on it?

> Do I have to be on time for that meeting?

> Should I stay at the Four Seasons or the Red Roof Inn?

> When I negotiate this contract, what’s more important: the price or the partnership?

> Should I point out what my peers do wrong, or what they do right?

> Should I go home at 5 p.m. or 8 p.m.?

> How hard do I need to study the competition?

> Should we discuss the color of this new product for five minutes or thirty hours?

> If I know something is badly broken in the company, should I say something? Whom should I tell?

> Is winning more important than ethics?

The answer is zero.

There aren’t any “right answers” to those questions. The right answers for your company depend on what your company is, what it does, and what it wants to be. In fact, how your employees answer these kinds of questions is your culture. 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.

So how do you design and shape these nearly invisible behaviors? I asked that of Shaka Senghor, who ran a powerful gang in the Michigan prison system in the 1990s and 2000s. Senghor knew that the lives of his guys depended on the gang’s culture. He told me, “It’s complex. Say someone steals one of your guys’ toothbrushes, what do you do?”

I said, “That seems innocent enough. Maybe the thief just wanted clean teeth?”

He corrected me: “A guy doesn’t take that risk for clean teeth. It’s a diagnostic. If we don’t respond, then he knows he can rob your guy of something larger or rape him or kill him and take over his business. So if I do nothing, I put all our members at risk. Killing the guy would be a big deterrent—but it would also create a superviolent culture.” He spread his hands. “As I said, it’s complex.”

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. For many startups, a culture of frugality is vital, so it makes sense to require that employees stay at the Red Roof Inn. But if Google is paying a salesperson $500,000 a year and it wants to retain her, it will probably prefer that she sleep well at the Four Seasons before her big meeting with Procter & Gamble.

Likewise, long days are standard in the startup world—you’re in a race against time. But at Slack, CEO Stewart Butterfield is convinced that if you actually work hard when you are at work, you can efficiently get a lot done. He punches out early and encourages his employees to do the same.

The culture that works for Apple would never work for Amazon. At Apple, generating the most brilliant designs in the world is paramount. To reinforce that message, it spent $5 billion on its sleek new headquarters. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your fat margins are my opportunity.” To reinforce that message, he made the company be frugal in everything, down to his employees’ ten-dollar desks. Both cultures work. Apple designs dramatically more beautiful products than Amazon, while Amazon’s products are dramatically cheaper than Apple’s.

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. Meanwhile, as business conditions shift and your strategy evolves, you have to keep changing your culture accordingly. The target is always moving.

### CULTURE IS THE STRONG FORCE

In business, if you have a strong culture but a product nobody wants, you fail. So culture might appear to be weaker than product. But if you look more deeply, over time, culture can overcome the seemingly invincible structural barriers of an era and transform the behavior of entire industries and social systems. From this broader perspective, culture is the strong force in the universe.

In the 1970s, a bunch of poor kids from the Bronx created a new art form, hip-hop. In a single generation they overcame poverty, racism, and massive opposition from the music industry to build the world’s most popular musical genre. They changed global culture by inventing a culture premised on candor and a hustler’s mentality.

The hustler’s mentality could be seen in how hip-hop DJs sourced their basic building block: breakbeats. Breakbeats were the part of the song that everyone got excited about on the dance floor—the beat-heavy breakdown sections that featured drums and bass, or just drums. The freshest breakbeats, the ones people hadn’t heard before, were often found on obscure records. Because these records were obscure, the record companies wouldn’t restock them if they suddenly sold out, which created a supply-chain problem. Hip-hop’s entrepreneurial culture worked right around it. Ralph McDaniels, who put the first rap videos on television and who coined the term “shout-out,” told me:

A guy named Lenny Roberts supplied these records to the stores and he knew precisely what was going to sell, because he was from the Bronx and that’s where it was all breaking. He marketed these breakbeats by giving them to Afrika Bambaataa or Grandmaster Flash, and when Flash played it every DJ would go, “Oh, I’ve got to have that record,” and the records would instantly sell out. So Lenny pressed his own records with just the breakbeats: the Breakbeats Volume One, Breakbeats Volume Two, etc. He didn’t have the rights, of course, but nobody was paying any attention.

People often ask me why I preface much of what I write with quotes from hip-hop. In part it’s a hangover from my failed career as a rapper—true story. But mostly it’s because the majority of my ideas about entrepreneurship, business, and culture occur to me while I’m listening to hip-hop, so it’s my way of giving credit where credit is due. I always felt that early hip-hop songs like Eric B. & Rakim’s “Follow the Leader” or Run-DMC’s “King of Rock” were about what I was doing as an entrepreneur. They are the culture in which I work.

While the hustling part of hip-hop culture made the business go, it was the honesty that drew the fans. The great rapper Nas told me that as a kid:

The rawness was what I gravitated towards. The world was supposed to be this picture-perfect place, the Brady Bunch. We’re all trying to be the Brady Bunch, but really we’re the Little Rascals. Rap explained what’s really going on—the crimes, the poverty, the corrupt police. Rap cleansed itself of pimp-sounding music or gospel-sounding music or a funky sound or a hippie sound. It extracted all that other stuff out of it and ripped itself raw until it was simply about honesty.

A continent away from the Bronx, a group of engineers in California established a set of cultural innovations that would end up changing how almost every business operates. In the 1960s, Bob Noyce, the coinventor of the integrated circuit, or microchip, ran Fairchild Semiconductor, a unit of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation.

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 Raytheon Semiconductor, Signetics, General Microelectronics, Intersil, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Qualidyne. Without exactly meaning to, Noyce had created the culture of Silicon Valley.

In 1968, Noyce himself split off to start a new company, resigning from Fairchild Semiconductor after being passed over for CEO of Fairchild Camera. He and his colleague Gordon Moore—the coiner of Moore’s law, which holds that microchip capacity doubles every eighteen months while its price falls in half—and a young physicist named Andy Grove founded Intel to tackle the nascent field of data storage.

At Intel, Noyce took his egalitarian ideas to a new level. Everyone worked in one big room with partitions separating them; Noyce himself sat at a secondhand metal desk. Lunch was deli sandwiches and soda. There was no layer of vice presidents; Noyce and Moore oversaw business segments run by middle managers who had enormous decision-making power. In meetings, the leader set the agenda, but everyone else was equal.

And, crucially, Noyce gave the engineers and most of the office workers substantial stock options. He believed that in a business driven by research and products, the engineers would behave more like owners if they actually owned the company.

Wolfe observedthat “At Intel everyone—Noyce included—was expected to attend sessions on ‘the Intel Culture.’” The culture was drilled into new employees by Andy Grove (who would go on to become the company’s CEO and a famous cultural innovator). Grove would ask, “How would you sum up the Intel approach?” Someone might answer, “At Intel you don’t wait for someone else to do it. You take the ball yourself and run with it.” Grove would reply, “Wrong. At Intel you take the ball yourself and you let the air out and you fold the ball up and put it in your pocket. Then you take another ball and run with it and when you’ve crossed the goal you take the second ball out of your pocket and reinflate it and score twelve points instead of six.”

This atmosphere allowed ideas to prosper; if Silicon Valley is about anything, it’s about the primacy of the idea. 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.

Imagine a culture of strict accountability that punishes failure—a very common culture back east, where executives strove to maintain their status, and failure was to be avoided at all costs. Now consider an idea that has a 90 percent chance of failing, but that would pay off at 1,000 to 1. Despite it being an extraordinarily good bet, the company that punishes failure will never fund it.

Hierarchies are good at weeding out obviously bad ideas. By the time an idea makes it all the way up the chain, it will have been compared to all the other ideas in the system, with the obviously good ideas ranked at the top. This seems like common sense. The problem is that obviously good ideas are not truly innovative, and truly innovative ideas often look like very bad ideas when they’re introduced. Western Union famously passed on the opportunity to buy Alexander Graham Bell’s patents and technology for the telephone. At the time, phone calls were extremely noisy and easy to misinterpret, and they couldn’t span long distances, and Western Union knew from its telegram business that profitable communication depended on accuracy and widespread reach. And Wikipedia was considered a joke when it started. How could something written by a crowd replace the work of the world’s top scholars? Today it is so much more comprehensive than anything that came before it that it’s widely considered the only encyclopedia.

The Intel culture, by elevating the individual and giving breakthrough ideas a chance, inaugurated a better way to do business. My business partner Marc Andreessen wrote an essay a few years ago called “Software Is Eating the World.” He described how technology has spread beyond the technology industry to take over every traditional business, from bookstores to taxi fleets to hotels. Existing companies have been forced to adopt aspects of Noyce’s culture or else expose themselves to an onslaught of existential threats. We’ve seen General Motors adopt stock options as it moved into autonomous vehicles by buying Cruise Automation, and Walmart employ a similar approach with its purchase of Jet.com.

Since tech became a consumer phenomenon, thousands of nontech people have come up with great ideas that use technology. But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company—literally as well as figuratively. Bob Noyce understood that, created the culture to support it, and changed the world.

### WHAT MAKES A CULTURE WORK?

Culture clearly has a powerful effect. So how do you shape it, how do you set it deep in people’s minds, and how do you fix it when it goes wrong?

These questions led me to larger questions and a wider frame of reference. How does culture work in a variety of different contexts? What makes it last for more than a few years?

I have long been interested in history, and particularly in how people behaved differently from what I would have expected, given the circumstances they were born into. For instance, I would never have expected that a man who was born into slavery and who would one day free the slaves of Haiti would own slaves himself along the way—but he did. Understanding how historical cultures shaped people’s views led me to begin considering what they had to do to change themselves and their culture. Grasping that seemed to be the key to creating the kind of culture that I wanted.

I selected four models in particular, one of whom is still very much alive. I wasn’t looking for ideal cultural end states—some of the models produced extremely violent or otherwise problematic cultures—but for people who were outstandingly effective in getting the cultures they wanted. Each of these models made me ask giant questions:

> Why has there been only one successful slave revolt in human history? And how did Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture reprogram slave culture to orchestrate it?

> How did bushido, the code of the samurai, enable the warrior class to rule Japan for seven hundred years and shape modern Japanese culture? What set of cultural virtues empowered them? The samurai called their principles “virtues” rather than “values”; virtues are what you do, while values are merely what you believe. As we’ll see, doing is what matters. (In what follows I will use “virtues” to refer to the ideal, and “values” to refer to what most companies now espouse.) How exactly did the samurai focus their culture on actions?

> How did Genghis Khan build the world’s largest empire? He was a total outsider, imprisoned as a youngster by his own tiny nomadic tribe. It’s easy to see how that made him want to smash existing hierarchies. But how, exactly, was he able to create an innovative and inclusive meritocracy? One that enabled him to constantly grow and improve while his foes were standing still?

> How did Shaka Senghor, sentenced to nineteen years in a Michigan prison for murder, make his prison gang the tightest, most ferocious group in the yard—and then transform it into something else entirely? How did culture turn him into a killer? How did he rise to dominate that culture? How did he take a group of outcasts and turn them into a cohesive team? Finally, how did he recognize what he disliked about his regime, and, by changing himself, change the entire prison culture?

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. But figuring out whether the root cause of a company’s success is its culture or some other factor isn’t easy. Most business books don’t look at culture from a wider, more sociological perspective. And most attempt to dissect successful companies’ cultures after the companies have succeeded. This approach confuses cause and effect. There are plenty of massively successful companies with weak, inconsistent, or even toxic cultures; a desirable product can overcome a miserable environment, at least for a while. If you don’t believe me, read up on Enron.

To avoid survivorship bias—the logical error of concentrating on companies that succeeded and falsely concluding that it was their culture that made them great—I try not to reverse engineer. Instead I look at the cultural techniques that leaders used as they tried to strengthen their culture in specific ways, and show how those efforts played out. So you won’t find any absolute “best cultures” in this book, just techniques to make your own culture do what you want it to.

### HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

I start by examining the four historical models described earlier, and then break out modern-day examples of those same cultural techniques. As you read these first seven chapters, think about how leaders like Toussaint Louverture and Genghis Khan saw culture, and the tools they devised to shift it even under extremely difficult circumstances, when everything seemed to be conspiring against them. Take note of practices you might want to emulate, and how perspectives well outside your own might be surprisingly pertinent. How did the samurai design a culture whose elements all fit neatly together? How is Shaka Senghor’s experience, coming into prison as a young man and having to figure out how it worked, relevant to new employees at your company?

Creating a culture is more complex than just trying to get your people to behave the way you want them to when no one is looking. Remember that your employees are far from uniform. They come from different countries, races, genders, backgrounds, even eras. Each one brings to your organization a different cultural point of departure. To get all of them to conform to and be reasonably happy with a common set of norms is a challenging puzzle.

To get them to be who you want, you will first need to see them for who they are. I wish I could give you a simple set of steps to do that, but there is no formula. Instead we’ll consider all these questions from a variety of perspectives. To that end, these chapters also feature modern-day case studies, usually worked up from my conversations with leaders who tried to change their companies. For instance, I examine how Toussaint Louverture’s cultural techniques were applied—or should have been applied—by Reed Hastings at Netflix, Travis Kalanick at Uber, and Hillary Clinton, and how Genghis Khan’s vision of cultural inclusiveness has parallels in the work of Don Thompson, the first African-American CEO of McDonald’s, and of Maggie Wilderotter, the CEO who led Frontier Communications.

I begin the second part of the book by walking you through how to understand your own personality and your company’s strategy and how to use that understanding to build the culture you need to succeed. Culture only works if the leader visibly participates in and vocally champions it. But most people don’t walk around with a supersharp definition of their personal cultural values. So how do you identify who you are and what parts of you belong in the organization (and don’t belong)? How do you become the kind of leader that you yourself want to follow?

Then I look at edge cases that can place your culture in conflict with itself or with your business priorities. And finally, I discuss a few components that probably belong in every culture, and give you a checklist of crucial principles.

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. Critics love to attack companies for having a “broken culture” or being “morally corrupt,” but it’s actually a minor miracle if a culture isn’t dysfunctional. No large organization ever gets anywhere near 100 percent compliance on every value, but some do much better than others. Our aim here is to be better, not perfect.

As a final word of discouragement: a great culture does not get you a great company. If your product isn’t superior or the market doesn’t want it, your company will fail no matter how good its culture is. Culture is to a company as nutrition and training are to an aspiring professional athlete. If the athlete is talented enough, he’ll succeed despite relatively poor nutrition and a below-average training regimen. If he lacks talent, perfect nutrition and relentless training will not qualify him for the Olympics. But great nutrition and training make every athlete better.

If a great culture won’t ensure success, why bother? In the end, the people who work for you won’t remember the press releases or the awards. They’ll lose track of the quarterly ups and downs. They may even grow hazy about the products. But they will never forget how it felt to work there, or the kind of people they became as a result. The company’s character and ethos will be the one thing they carry with them. It will be the glue that holds them together when things go wrong. It will be their guide to the tiny, daily decisions they make that add up to a sense of genuine purpose.

This book is not a comprehensive set of techniques for creating a perfect culture. There is no one ideal. A culture’s strengths may also be its weaknesses. And sometimes you have to break a core principle of your culture to survive. Culture is crucial, but if the company fails because you insist on cultural purity, you’re doing it wrong.

Instead, the book will take you on a journey through culture, from ancient to modern. Along the way, you will learn how to answer a question fundamental to any organization: who are we? A simple-seeming question that’s not simple at all. Because who you are is how people talk about you when you’re not around. How do you treat your customers? Are you there for people in a pinch? Can you be trusted?

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.