This past summer I read a proof of Ben Horowitz’s new book, What You Do Is Who You Are, and I even blogged about it here without naming the book.
What You Do is about culture, how you make it, how you keep it, and how the big decisions you make and how you explain them set the culture in your organization.
To explain this Ben tells the story of four different cultures that were set by strong leaders:
– the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture
– the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture
– Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire
– Shaka Senghor, a man convicted of murder who ran the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture.
https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/0062871331/
These stories really make it clear how you set and keep your culture. You will come away from this book with a clear understanding of how your actions will set the culture in your company.
I read Ben’s interview with Connie Loizos and I like what he said here about why he wrote the book:
First, it was the thing that I had the most difficult time with as a CEO. People would say, ‘Ben, pay attention to culture, it really is the key.’ But when you were like, ‘Okay, great, how do i do that?’ it was like, ‘Um, maybe you should have a meeting about it.’ Nobody could convey: what it was, how you dealt with it, how you designed it. So I felt like I was missing a piece of my own education.
Also, when I look at the work I do now, it’s the most important thing. What I say to people at the firm is that nobody 10 or 20 or 30 years from now is going to remember what deals we’ve won or lost or what the returns were on this or that. You’re going to remember what it felt like to work here and to do business with us and what kind of imprint we put on the world. And that’s our culture. That’s our behavior. We can’t have any drift from that. And I think that’s true for every company.
So if you leading your company and you are thinking “ok, great, how do I do that?”, then go get this book and read it. I think you will come away with a much better understanding of what culture is all about.
