What You Do Is Who You Are

**Author:** Ben Horowitz **Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

### What You'll Learn

How culture actually forms in organizations, why most attempts to shape it fail, and what leaders can do to build a culture that drives results. You'll discover why actions matter more than words, how historical leaders from samurai to prison gangs created cultures that lasted, and practical frameworks for designing, implementing, and evolving culture in your own organization.

### Who This Book Is For

Leaders who want to move beyond vague mission statements and values posters. Founders building companies from scratch. Managers inheriting broken cultures. Anyone who has ever wondered why their organization behaves in ways that contradict its stated values. If you've ever felt that culture is something that happens to you rather than something you control, this book will change how you think.

Every company has a culture. Most leaders don't know how theirs got there. Walk into any startup and you'll see the artifacts: the foosball table, the open floor plan, the values painted on the wall. Walk into any Fortune 500 company and you'll see the compliance training, the employee handbook, the carefully worded mission statement. None of these things are culture. They're decorations. The real culture lives in what people actually do when no one is watching, in the decisions that get made under pressure, in the behaviors that get rewarded and the ones that get punished. Ben Horowitz learned this the hard way. As cofounder and CEO of Opsware, he watched his company nearly die multiple times. He made decisions that haunted him. He fired people he cared about. He kept people he shouldn't have. Through it all, he discovered that the culture he thought he was building and the culture that actually existed were often very different things. The gap between intention and reality became his obsession. The problem is that most leaders treat culture as a soft topic, something for HR to handle, something that matters after the real work gets done. They assume that if they articulate good values, good behavior will follow. They believe that culture is about making people feel good, about creating a nice place to work. They're wrong on all counts. Culture is the hardest thing about running an organization because it's invisible, it's constantly changing, and it's shaped by every action you take whether you intend it or not. Every time you promote someone, you're making a statement about what matters. Every time you fire someone, you're teaching everyone what the real rules are. Every time you decide what to focus on in a meeting, you're telling people what's important. You can't opt out of culture creation. The only choice is whether you shape…