A new perspective on organizational culture.
I was pretty pumped when I learned Ben Horowitz had another book on the way, and not just because I actually know most of rap verses he uses to start chapters.
You see, Horowitz’s last book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, has a special place in my heart after reading it no less than six times over a particularly challenging nine months of leadership. If you’ve read it, you’ll appreciate that at least part of re-reading Hard Things so many times was to remind myself that no matter how tough I thought my situation was, things could be shittier.
Horowitz’s journey as an entrepreneur and CEO wasn’t a clean, linear path to awesome and the war stories in Hard Things puts most CEO experiences to shame. My review of Hard Things (before it became therapeutic reading) is here.
Needless to say, I wasted no time picking up Horowitz’s newest book, What You Do is Who You Are.
What You Do is Who You Are is different from Hard Things in many ways, but it shares the same flow that makes it hard to put down. I finished both the same day I started them. And Kevin Kenerly once again narrates the audio version flawlessly.
If Hard Things was a book to current or aspiring entrepreneurs and CEOs on what it can really be like to run a company, What You Do is Who You Are is a book to the same audience about what it really takes to design and build a culture for your company.
There are already many books on culture, which in and of itself, can be an ambiguous concept, so why do we need another? I’d argue for two reasons (at least):
Horowitz’s experience as a CEO and venture capitalist gives him unique insight into not just one or two organizations, but hundreds, so the sample size forming his perspective is understandably higher than most.
Horowitz didn’t just go look at all the companies that are commonly referenced when we think about how culture impacts the top and bottom lines. There aren’t any stories here about Zappos or Southwest Airlines. Instead, alongside stories from Stripe or Slack, we learn about cultures built by Ghengis Khan, Samurais, a prison gang leader, and a slave who built an army of slaves that defeated world superpowers and reprogrammed slave culture in the region. Not your typical “org culture” approach.
In other words, this isn’t a rehash of cultures you’ve already heard about or how startups are wheeling in ping-pong tables and Yoga instructors to create the “best places to work.”
As a manager and former CEO, I’ve placed big bets on my very passionate belief that culture dramatically affects productivity and the long-term value of companies.
As an advisor, I focus heavily on creating cultures capable of executing your objectives. But even with a decade of experience driving change in this space, What You Do is Who You Are led me to reevaluate some of my views on culture, which I appreciate.
A few of my takeaways were:
Virtues over values: I’ve been a proponent of articulating the standards of the culture you are trying to design with values (or principles). Horowitz points out, though, that “virtues are what you do, while values are merely what you believe.” This is an important distinction, particularly since so many cultures are indeed built on values. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but defining a culture based on virtues (what you do) vs. values (what you believe) was a paradigm shift for me.
The importance of “object lessons”: Horowitz describes an object lesson as “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 to make sure the bad thing never happens again.” In hindsight, firing top sales performers or entire management teams for blatantly violating the standards we were setting were examples of object lessons I’ve used, though I didn’t know the term for it. Horowitz articulates the importance of these quite well incorporating some common sense and some Sun Tzu.
Unintended consequences of culture design: Horowitz does a great job of articulating the real-life challenges of designing and building a culture. Among those challenges is designing a culture based on carefully articulated expectations, only to later realize the expectations themselves had unintended consequences that ended up threatening the company. Uber learned this the hard way, as the book details.
The importance of culture malleability: Times change, and cultures that remain stagnant, without any malleability, risk allowing their culture to become a liability. As Horowitz effectively describes in the book, this can happen when a company needs to shift from “peacetime” to “wartime” in order to address competitive threats or a changing business landscape. If the culture prevents that shift from occurring, it can eventually become the company’s downfall.
Malleability is a good segue into what I thought was the only debatable part of the book, which is knowingly allowing a company’s virtues, values, or principles to be violated in extreme circumstances. I certainly wouldn’t advocate saving a “culture” at the expense of the company. After all, what good is a great culture of a dead company? But the standard for “extreme circumstances” may erode if exceptions are made to fit that standard, and the “exception” may become the rule. Horowitz does note that the tolerance level of these kinds of actions varies from company to company and is as much a part of the culture as the standards they espouse.
Overall, there’s no question that What You Do Is Who You Are is a valuable addition to the increasingly popular dialogue on company and organizational culture. It’s a very different perspective on the subject, and even for someone who has read and executed quite a bit in this space, I found it to be loaded with insights.
I’ll read it again, for sure. I can’t think of a scenario where six times in nine months will be required, but you never know.
You can also catch Horowitz over on Tim Ferriss’ podcast here.
