What You Do Is Who You Are
On Intel’s 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.”
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (pp. 9-10). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
Process Can Kill a Great Idea
Add this to Bananas article
Variation can be very helpful to an organization but can often be killed by it. I could add this to my article on variation.
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.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (pp. 10-11). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
There is No One Best Culture
Most business books are reverse engineered. See my blog post on the halo effect.
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.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (pp. 14-15). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
Insist on the Highest Standards — Hillary
This would be a great section in my Amazon Book. But is the person mistyping the answer really the “insist on the highest standard” that we’re talking about here. No…
CyberScoop, a cyber-security news organization, explained what happened: Podesta wasn’t hacked because he used a bad password. His email was breached because hackers sent a spear phishing email pretending to be Google asking for his credentials because, according to the fake email, he had already been hacked. It’s a common tactic of hackers to create emotional urgency during an attack. Ironic as it is, pretending you’ve already been hacked is a common tactic because it can push people to quickly click malicious links without thinking through or checking the consequences.
In other words, Podesta was hacked in the simplest and most common way—via an email that told him to click on a link to protect himself. Anybody who’s read the most cursory article about Internet security knows that the first rule is, Don’t click on an unknown link and enter your password. A legitimate business will never ask you to do it. So how could this happen?
The official story is that Podesta forwarded the suspicious email to the campaign’s IT person asking whether it was legitimate and that person told campaign aide Charles Delavan that it was a phishing attack. Then Delavan mistyped in his note to Podesta, saying it was “a legitimate email” and that Podesta should “change his password immediately.” Should we believe this explanation? This would be the equivalent of a suicide hotline chat where the hotline rep mistypes that the person at risk should swallow the bottle of pills and wash them down with a fifth of tequila.
In her book about the campaign, What Happened, Clinton recognized that questions about her personal handling of emails—as pointed out in former FBI director James Comey’s inflammatory letter to Congress about them just ten days before the election—were compounded by the Podesta hack: “Together, the effects of Comey’s letter and the Russian attack formed a devastating combination.”
In her book about the campaign, What Happened, Clinton recognized that questions about her personal handling of emails—as pointed out in former FBI director James Comey’s inflammatory letter to Congress about them just ten days before the election—were compounded by the Podesta hack: “Together, the effects of Comey’s letter and the Russian attack formed a devastating combination.”
In her book about the campaign, What Happened, Clinton recognized that questions about her personal handling of emails—as pointed out in former FBI director James Comey’s inflammatory letter to Congress about them just ten days before the election—were compounded by the Podesta hack: “Together, the effects of Comey’s letter and the Russian attack formed a devastating combination.”
But there was a flaw in the plan. Two-factor authentication was required on everyone’s work email. The phishing attack was sent to Podesta’s personal email. Now, what past behavior could possibly have given Podesta the idea that he could send and receive tons of highly confidential campaign emails from his personal email account? Oh, snap.
Not once did Hillary Clinton tell John Podesta, “Don’t take email security seriously.” Not once would she ever have told him that. But Clinton’s actions overrode her intentions. It did not matter that the campaign had taken all the steps necessary to prevent the attack, because John Podesta imitated what Hillary Clinton did, not what she said. The talk said, “Secure your email”; the walk said, “Personal convenience is more important.” The walk almost always wins. That’s how culture works.
Before condemning Clinton for this catastrophic error, keep in mind that every leader will make decisions she later regrets. Nobody has ever been close to perfect. Furthermore, it is a common and understandable mistake to think of cyber security as an isolated function that, like processing payroll, has no bearing on the larger culture. In fact, the most important aspects of an organization’s performance—quality, design, security, fiscal discipline, customer care—are all culturally driven.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 75). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
Always Dying Means Always Doing Your Best
Bushido Shoshinshu explains the idea behind that contemplation: I
f you realize that the life that is here today is not certain on the morrow, then when you take your orders from your employer, and when you look in on your parents, you will have the sense that this may be the last time—so you cannot fail to become truly attentive to your employer and your parents.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 92). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
Always be prepared for death
Although paying so much attention to personal appearance may seem vain, it is because of the samurai’s resolve to die at any moment that he makes preparations so meticulously. If slain with an unkempt appearance, he will be scorned by his enemy as being unclean.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 93). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
There are fates worse than death or bankruptcy or losing your job
The biggest threat to your company’s culture is a time of crisis, a period when you’re getting crushed by the competition or are nearing bankruptcy. How do you focus on the task at hand if you might be killed at any moment? The answer: they can’t kill you if you’re already dead. If you’ve already accepted the worst possible outcome, you have nothing to lose. Hagakure commands you to imagine and accept the worst in gory detail:
Begin each day pondering death as its climax. Each morning, with a calm mind, conjure images in your head of your last moments. See yourself being pierced by bow and arrow, gun, sword, or spear, or being swept away by a giant wave, vaulting into a fiery inferno, taking a lightning strike, being shaken to death in a great earthquake, falling hundreds of feet from a high cliff top, succumbing to a terminal illness, or just dropping dead unexpectedly. Every morning, be sure to meditate yourself into a trance of death.
Meditating on your company’s downfall will enable you to build your culture the right way. Imagine you’ve gone bankrupt. Were you a great place to work? What was it like to do business with you? Did your encounters with people leave them better off or worse off? Did the quality of your products make you proud?
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 94). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
Culture Has Memorable Phrases
We have three rules here at Netscape. The first rule is if you see a snake, don’t call committees, don’t call your buddies, don’t form a team, don’t get a meeting together, just kill the snake. The second rule is don’t go back and play with dead snakes. Too many people waste too much time on decisions that have already been made. And the third rule of snakes is: all opportunities start out looking like snakes.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 105). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
On Copying Culture
Add this to the dress code article. Eventually, this will be in the book.
You may be adopting an organizing principle you don’t understand. For example, Intel created a casual-dress standard to promote meritocracy. Its leaders believed the best idea should win, not the idea from the highest-ranking person in the fanciest suit. Many current Silicon Valley companies don’t know that history, and adopt the casual dress without adopting the meritocracy that underpinned it.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 128). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
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.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 9). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
On Understanding Your Company Culture
There’s something very interesting here about incentives. I always thought that an organization did whatever the incentives told them to do. However, culture and incentives are inextricably linked. Incentives are the manifestation of it. However culture really is about the money incentives as well as the soft incentives about what it takes to survive and thrive in an organization.
The best way to understand your culture is not through what managers tell you, but through how new employees behave. What behaviors do they perceive will help them fit in, survive, and succeed? That’s your company’s culture. Go around your managers to ask new employees these questions directly after their first week. And make sure you ask them for the bad stuff, the practices or assumptions that made them wary and uncomfortable. Ask them what’s different than other places they’ve worked—not just what’s better, but what’s worse. And ask them for advice: “If you were me, how would you improve the culture based on your first week here? What would you try to enhance?”
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 129). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
The Right Way to Do Diversity
Many times diversity is about counting different people. In order to get beyond quotas, you have to change the criteria for what you’re hiring for. Generally, the people who make the criteria are the people who are already there so if you want different people, you need to look at different criteria.
Our firm had this issue in every department. Our head of marketing was a woman and she had a lot of women working for her. I asked her what was in her profile that made it difficult for men to get a job in marketing. “Helpfulness,” she replied. I was floored. Of course! We were a services firm. Every job description in our company should have helpfulness in the profile, but I was the founder and I had never even considered it. I was blind. I could not see the exact contours of the talent we needed to find, so we were missing out.
People who come from different backgrounds and cultures bring different skills, different communication styles, and different mores to the organization. When we tested for helpfulness, women scored higher (though of course there are helpful men, too). Testing for it required me to think differently about how we assess candidates. One thing to look for is volunteer work, which helpful people naturally like to do. It also turns out that during the interview, helpful people want to talk much more about the interviewer than about themselves: by learning about her they can anticipate her needs and be, well, helpful.
Similarly, when we tested for the ability to create a relationship, African-Americans scored higher. We’d look for it by seeing how candidates built relationships with us during the interview—after interviewing someone, did you want to spend more time with him? One young African-American man who was great at it turned out to have the highest tips of any Cheesecake Factory waiter in the nation. He was absolutely expert at creating an instantaneous relationship. If you’re having trouble seeing the value in a particular talent pool, the answer is not to set up a parallel talent process for those groups; the answer is to fix the talent process you have so you can cure your blindness.
Next, we changed our hiring process. When a manager wants to make a new hire, she must now have people from talent pools different from her own (for instance, U.S. military veterans, African-Americans, etc.) review the hiring criteria and make suggestions about what they would hire for and how they would test for those qualities. For example, one criterion men often overlook when hiring a manager—but women rarely do—is the ability to give feedback. Women are more willing to confront a coworker and have a difficult conversation; men often avoid the issue until it gets superhot. We also made sure that our interview teams came from a range of backgrounds, so that we were better able to see the complete candidate.
Our new process is not perfect, but it is clearly better than our old one. Today half of our 172 people are women, and the firm is 27 percent Asian and 18.4 percent African American and Hispanic. That’s a lot of talent that we might not have seen had we stuck to our old process.
More important, we haven’t just improved our numbers. We’ve improved our cultural cohesion. Because we test for helpfulness, we value it and we value the people who have it. We can see them for who they are, not what they look like.
It’s easy to value the things that you test for in an interview and nearly impossible to value things that you don’t. When a company hires an African-American employee because he or she is African-American, then race becomes a reason for making decisions in that culture and the culture often becomes racist. What you do is who you are. If someone enters a company through the Urban HR division, everyone will remember that fact, and the employee will be suspect and have to prove herself over and over. Whereas if everyone is hired on the same criteria, then the culture will see people for who they are and what they uniquely bring to the table.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 178). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
There is No Best Culture
This book would be much more elegant if I could just assert that all companies have a single, cohesive, nonconflicting culture. Alas, any company of any significant size will have subcultures in addition to its main culture.
Subcultures usually emerge because the divisions of a company are often quite distinct from one another. As different functions require different skill sets, salespeople, marketing people, HR people, and engineers tend to come from different schools, to have majored in different subjects, and to have different personality types. This leads to cultural variation.
As a salesperson, you must know the truth. Does the customer have the necessary budget? Are you ahead of or behind the competition? Who in the target organization is a supporter and who is a detractor? Experienced salespeople like to say, “Buyers are liars.” That’s because, for a variety of reasons, buyers do not volunteer the truth. They may enjoy being wined and dined; they may be using you as a stalking horse to get a better price out of the competition; or they may just have a hard time saying “No.” Like Jack Bauer in 24 interrogating a terrorist, you must extract the truth. In sales, if you take what you’re told at face value, you won’t last.
When you ask an engineer a question, her instinct is to answer it with great precision. When you ask a salesperson a question, she’ll try to figure out the question behind the question. If a customer asks, “Do you have feature X?” a good engineer will answer yes or no. A good salesperson will almost never answer that way. She will ask herself, “Why are they asking about that feature? Which competitor has that feature? Hmm, then they must be in the account trying to take my deal. I need more information.” So she’ll reply with something like, “Why do you think feature X is important?”
Having their questions answered with questions drives engineers insane. They want answers fast, so they can get back to work. But if they hope to see their product succeed—if they want great salespeople to go sell it, so they can keep working for a company that’s still in business—they need to be able to tolerate that cultural difference.
In a well-run organization, engineers get compensated more for how good the product is than for how much money it ends up bringing in, because there are often serious market risks that are outside the engineer’s control. Great engineers love to build things and often code on side projects as a hobby. So creating a comfortable environment that encourages round-the-clock programming is vital. Hallmarks of engineering cultures often include casual dress, late morning arrival times, and late or very late evening departure times.
Great salespeople are more like boxers. They may enjoy what they do, but nobody sells software on the weekends for fun. Like prizefighting, selling is done for the money and the competition—no prize, no fight. So sales organizations focus on commissions, sales contests, president’s clubs, and other prize-oriented forms of compensation. Salespeople represent the company to the outside world, so they need to dress accordingly and show up early, when their customers punch in. Great sales cultures are competitive, aggressive, and highly compensated—but only for results.
While every company needs core common cultural elements, trying to make all aspects of your culture identical across functions means weakening some functions in favor of others. For example, virtues like “We are obsessed with customers,” “The best idea wins regardless of rank,” and “We outwork the competition” all apply at the company level. But “We dress casually” or “We only care about results” are usually more apt for a subculture.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 189). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
Here’s an example of an interview for a salesperson that would work horribly for an engineer.
A well-designed cultural interview need not be long. Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) is a computer-aided-design software company with a legendary sales culture. My head of sales at Opsware, culture-changer Mark Cranney, came from PTC and was always bragging about how good they were at selling. I got annoyed and asked why they were so great. He said, “Well, it started with the interview. I walked into the interview with the senior vice president of sales, John McMahon. He said nothing for what seemed like five minutes, then asked me, ‘What would you do if I punched you in the face right now?’”
At this point in Mark’s story, I cried, “What!? He wanted to know what you would do if he punched you in the face? That’s crazy. What did you say?”
Mark said, “I asked him, ‘Are you testing my intelligence or my courage?’ And McMahon said, ‘Both.’ So I said, ‘Well, you’d better knock me out.’ He said, ‘You’re hired.’ Right then I knew that I’d found a home.”
How did McMahon make a hiring decision so quickly? That brief exchange enabled him to suss out whether Mark was a fit with his key cultural elements: the ability to keep your poise under fire, the ability to listen carefully, the courage to discover why a question is being asked—and, most of all, competitiveness.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (pp. 193-194). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
Object Lessons
This reminds me of the punishments that “make an example of people” like Martha Stewart. It’s not about the punishment for that person but creating a culture so that everyone will do the right thing.
No technique more strongly shapes and changes culture than the object lesson. It can seem similar to a shocking rule, but a shocking rule is something you put in place to beg the question of why it’s there. No actual situation that invokes the shocking rule has to arise for the rule to have an impact.
An object lesson, by contrast, is a dramatic warning you put into effect after something bad has happened and you need to correct it in a way that will reset the culture and make sure the bad thing never happens again.
The Chinese general Sun Tzu, author of the oldest military treatise in the world, The Art of War, understood object lessons perfectly. The great ancient historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien gives this account of how Sun Tzu employed them:
Sun Tzu Wu was a native of the Ch’i State. Art of War brought him to the notice of Ho Lu, King of Wu. Ho Lu said to him: “I have carefully perused your 13 chapters. May I submit your theory of managing your soldiers to a slight test?”
Sun Tzu replied: “You may.”
Ho Lu asked: “May the test be applied to women?”
The answer was again in the affirmative, so arrangements were made to bring 180 ladies to the Palace. Sun Tzu divided them into two companies and placed one of the King’s favorite concubines at the head of each. He then bade them all take spears in their hands, and addressed them thus: “I presume you know the difference between front and back, right hand and left hand?”
The girls replied: “Yes.”
Sun Tzu went on: “When I say ‘Eyes front,’ you must look straight ahead. When I say ‘Left turn,’ you must face towards your left hand. When I say ‘Right turn,’ you must face your right hand. When I say ‘About turn,’ you must face right round towards the back.”
Again the girls assented. The words of command having been thus explained, he set up the halberds and battle-axes in order to begin the drill. Then, to the sound of drums, he gave the order “Right turn.” But the girls only burst out laughing. Sun Tzu said: “If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame.”
So he started drilling them again, and this time gave the order “Left turn,” whereupon the girls once more burst into fits of laughter. Sun Tzu said: “If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame. But if his orders are clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers.”
Sun Tzu replied: “Having once received His Majesty’s commission to be general of his forces, there are certain commands of His Majesty which, acting in that capacity, I am unable to accept.”
Accordingly, he had the two leaders beheaded, and straightway installed the pair next in order as leaders in their place. When this had been done, the drum was sounded for the drill once more; and the girls went through all the evolutions, turning to the right or to the left, marching ahead or wheeling back, kneeling or standing, with perfect accuracy and precision, not venturing to utter a sound. Then Sun Tzu sent a messenger to the King saying: “Your soldiers, Sire, are now properly drilled and disciplined, and ready for your Majesty’s inspection. They can be put to any use that their sovereign may desire; bid them go through fire and water, and they will not disobey.”
But the King replied: “Let our general cease drilling and return to camp. As for us, We have no wish to come down and inspect the troops.”
Thereupon Sun Tzu said: “The King is only fond of words, and cannot translate them into deeds.”
After that, Ho Lu saw that Sun Tzu was one who knew how to handle an army, and finally appointed him general. In the West, he defeated the Ch’u State and forced his way into Ying, the capital; to the north, he put fear into the States of Ch’i and Chin, and spread his fame abroad amongst the feudal princes. And Sun Tzu shared in the might of the King.
The story sounds superharsh: why kill the concubines? They weren’t even soldiers. It seems so unfair. Yet this unfairness was the key to setting the culture Sun Tzu wanted. Because it was so ruthless, he knew the story of the beheadings would travel throughout the kingdom. Nobody would ever be confused about whether it was okay to giggle at an order. This was critical, because Sun Tzu knew that in a battle one soldier losing discipline could cost him everything. He needed the culture to be rock solid from the king to the concubines, and he made it so with a searing object lesson.
If your company faces an existential threat, you may need to employ a similarly unfair object lesson. Imagine you have a rogue salesperson who cuts a side deal with a customer. While the contract states the sale is final, the side letter lets the customer return your product any time during the first three months of the deal. The salesperson never tells finance or legal about the side agreement. The finance department then incorrectly accounts for the sale as revenue, thereby committing accounting fraud (for a sale to be booked as revenue, it cannot be reversible).
What should you do? You certainly have to fire the salesperson and report the accounting error, but will that change the culture? If you don’t change the culture, this type of behavior might kill your company, as few companies survive multiple bouts of fraud. The cultural best practice is to take Sun Tzu’s approach: you should fire not only the salesperson, but the entire chain of command he reports to. Though managers in sales understand that they’re legally responsible for their subordinates’ actions, the mass firing will still be wildly unfair to at least some of them. Yet in this situation a CEO must take a Confucian approach, as the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. The object lesson will be universally understood: at this company, we never do anything illegal.
If a salesperson merely tells a customer that a feature is coming when it isn’t, but he doesn’t bind the company to the feature’s arrival, then you should reprimand or perhaps fire him, but it won’t be necessary to remove the entire hierarchy above him.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (pp. 215-216). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
On One Way and Two Way Doors
You’d think that in a large company you’d value accuracy more than speed but that doesn’t make sense because that would cause too many bottlenecks.
The final vital component of the decision-making process is “Do you favor speed or accuracy and by how much?” The answer depends on the nature and size of your business. At a large company like Amazon or General Motors, with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of decisions that must be made each day, speed is far more important than accuracy. In many cases, it will often be faster to make the wrong decision, discover that it’s wrong, and pivot to the right decision, than to spend the time a priori figuring out the right decision.
Imagine a large company taking six months to decide whether to include a particular feature on the product. That would mean that for six months, one hundred employees might be blocked from making progress on everything related to the product. Was the decision really that critical? Did they really need to debate it for six months? Probably not.
On the other hand, consider a business like Andreessen Horowitz, where I work. We make about twenty important investment decisions a year. Getting those right is generally a much higher priority than making them quickly. If you only have twenty shots on goal in a year, you want to make sure each one counts. So we’ll spend hours and hours debating, visiting and revisiting aspects of our decision—then work through the entire process again the next day. Accuracy is much more important to us than speed.
Even if you generally favor speed, it is often important culturally to favor accuracy in certain situations. If “great design” or “great taste” is a key part of your value proposition and your culture, then it might be useful to spend dozens of hours debating the exact shade of black of your product’s packaging. Taking such pains might not materially improve your sales, but it will absolutely reinforce the cultural message that you don’t take shortcuts about design.
Some decisions are so “make or break” that they require a different process. Amazon generally has a “two-pizza teams” process: there should be no more people making most product decisions than can be fed by two pizzas. However, when Amazon is deciding whether to launch a new cloud service requiring a multibillion-dollar investment, it runs a much longer process with many more people involved.
In the speed-versus-accuracy calibration, the cultural question of empowerment plays an important role. How far down the org chart can a decision get made? Do you trust lower-level employees to decide important matters, and do they have enough information to do so with accuracy?
If employees have a real say in the business, they will be far more engaged and productive. It’s also often the case that sending the question up the hierarchy not only slows things down but results in a less accurate decision.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 227). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
Encourage Bad News
When I heard about a problem, I tried to seem ecstatic. I’d say, “Isn’t it great we found out about this before it killed us?” Or, “This is going to make the company so much stronger once we solve it.” People take their cues from the leader, so if you’re okay with bad news, they’ll be okay, too. Good CEOs run toward the pain and the darkness; eventually they even learn to enjoy it.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 240). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
Your Cultural Checklist
With these thoughts on virtues that belong in almost any culture, we’ve reached the point where you’re ready to go make your own. Here’s a checklist of points to keep in mind:
Cultural design. Make sure your culture aligns with both your personality and your strategy. Anticipate how it might be weaponized and define it in a way that’s unambiguous.
Cultural orientation. An employee’s first day at work may not be as indelible as Shaka Senghor’s first day out of quarantine, but it always makes a lasting impression. People learn more about what it takes to succeed in your organization on that day than on any other. Don’t let that first impression be wrong or accidental.
Shocking rules. Any rule so surprising it makes people ask “Why do we have this rule?” will reinforce key cultural elements. Think about how you can shock your organization into cultural compliance.
Incorporate outside leadership. Sometimes the culture you need is so far away from the culture you have that you need to get outside help. Rather than trying to move your company to a culture that you don’t know well, bring in an old pro from the culture you aspire to have.
Object lessons. What you say means far less than what you do. If you really want to cement a lesson, use an object lesson. It need not be a Sun Tzu–style beheading, but it must be dramatic.
Make ethics explicit. One of the most common and devastating mistakes leaders make is to assume people will “Do the right thing” even when it conflicts with other objectives. Don’t leave ethical principles unsaid.
Give cultural tenets deep meaning. Make them stand out from the norm, from the expected. If the ancient samurai had defined politeness the way we define it today, it would have had zero impact on the culture. Because they defined it as the best way to express love and respect, it still shapes Japanese culture today. What do your virtues really mean?
Walk the talk. “Do as I say, not as I do” never works. So refrain from choosing cultural virtues that you don’t practice yourself.
Make decisions that demonstrate priorities. It was not enough for Louverture to say his culture was not about revenge. He had to demonstrate it by forgiving the slave owners.
These techniques will help you shape the culture you want, but remember that a perfect culture is totally unattainable. Your goal is to have the best possible culture for your company, so it stays aimed at its target. If you want people to treat every corporate nickel like it’s their own, then having them stay at the Red Roof Inn sends a better cultural signal than having them stay at the Four Seasons—but if you want them to have the confidence to ask for a $5 million order, the opposite might be true. If you don’t know what you want, there is no chance that you will get it.
Culture begins with deciding what you value most. Then you must help everyone in your organization practice behaviors that reflect those virtues. If the virtues prove ambiguous or just plain counterproductive, you have to change them. When your culture turns out to lack crucial elements, you have to add them. Finally, you have to pay close attention to your people’s behavior, but even closer attention to your own. How is it affecting your culture? Are you being the person you want to be?
This is what it means to create a great culture. This is what it means to be a leader.
Horowitz, Ben. What You Do Is Who You Are (p. 246). Harper Business. Kindle Edition.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
My favorite parts of this book are all in Ben’s Blog Posts.
From: CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is
A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol (bad news travels fast, good news travels slow)
If you investigate companies which have failed, you will find many employees who knew about the fatal issues long before those issues killed the company. If the employees knew about the deadly problems, why didn’t they say something? Too often the answer is that the company culture discouraged the spread of bad news, so the knowledge lay dormant until it was too late to act.
A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved. The resulting action item for CEOs: build a culture which rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.
As a corollary, beware of management maxims that stop information from flowing freely in your company. For example, consider the old management standard: “don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution.” What if the employee cannot solve an important problem? For example, what if an engineer identifies a serious flaw in the way the product is being marketed? Do you really want him to bury that information? Management truisms like these may be good for employees to aspire to in the abstract, but they can also be the enemy of free-flowing information—some of which may be critical for the health of the company.
From Lies that Losers Tell
To answer that question, I thought back to a conversation that I had years ago with the incomparable Andy Grove.
Back at the tail end of the Great Internet Bubble in 2001, as all the big technology companies began missing their quarters by giant amounts, I found myself wondering how none of them saw it coming. One would think after the great dot-com crash of April 2000, companies like Cisco, Siebel, and HP would realize that they would soon face a slowdown as many of their customers hit the wall, but despite perhaps the most massive and public early warning system of all time, each CEO reiterated strong guidance right up until the point where they dramatically whiffed their quarters.
I asked Andy why these great CEOs would lie about their impending fate.
He said they were not lying to investors, but rather, they were lying to themselves.
Andy explained that humans, particularly those who build things, only listen to leading indicators of good news. For example, if a CEO hears that engagement for her application increased an incremental 25% beyond the normal growth rate one month, she will be off to the races hiring more engineers to keep up with the impending tidal wave of demand. On the other hand, if engagement decreases 25%, she will be equally intense and urgent in explaining it away: “The site was slow that month, there were 4 holidays, we made a UI change that caused all the problems. For gosh sakes, let’s not panic!”
Both leading indicators may have been wrong, or both may have been right, but our hypothetical CEO—like almost every other CEO—only took action on the positive indicator and only looked for alternative explanations on the negative leading indicator.
So if you read this and it all sounds too familiar and you find yourself wondering why your honest employees are lying to you, the answer is they are not. They are lying to themselves.
And if you believe them, you are lying to yourself.
From: A Good Place to Work
Me: “Let me break it down for you. In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this. Every person can wake up knowing that the work they do will be efficient, effective and make a difference both for the organization and themselves. These things make their jobs both motivating and fulfilling.
“In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.”
Steve: “OK.”
Me: “Are you aware that your manager Tim has not met with any of his employees in the past six months?”
Steve: “No.”
Me: “Now that you are aware, do you realize that there is no possible way for him to even be informed as to whether or not his organization is good or bad?”
Steve: “Yes.”
Me: “In summary, you and Tim are preventing me from achieving my one and only goal. You have become a barrier blocking me from achieving my most important goal. As a result, if Tim doesn’t meet with each one of his employees in the next 24 hours, I will have no choice but to fire him and to fire you. Are we clear?”
Steve: “Crystal.”