Ben Horowitz argues that company culture is defined by everyday actions and observable behaviors, not by written values, mission statements, or performance reviews. He emphasizes that behaviors—how people return calls, show up to meetings, and live day-to-day—constitute culture, citing a Samurai quote and his book What You Do Is Who You Are to underscore that "culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions."
Chapters
It's a very difficult but important thing in that you have an organization, you've got a mission statement, you have all the management techniques, you have KPIs, OKRs, whatever. You're using goals and objectives. But none of that is really what the culture is. And none of that really drives the real day to day behaviors that define you. Like, do you return that phone call immediately to tomorrow, next week? Never. Do you show up at the meeting on time? Are you late? Do you go home at 5 o'? Clock? Do you go home at 8 o'? Clock? Do you stay at the Four Seasons? Do you stay at the Red Roof Inn? All these things are your culture, but there's not really, they're not defined anyway. So how do they get, how does that behavior go? And anybody who's worked in a company knows you're either this way or you're that way, or you're on time, or you're never on time, or you're always on time or whatever it is. Those are all these cultural elements. And the kind of advice that you get when you're CEO is all wrong on it because it's like, oh, well, what you do is you go and you have an off site and then you kind of have everybody say what they think the cultural values are and then you put them on like a nice plaque and then you oh, but we're really going to operationalize it here. We're going to put in people's performance review. Well, you don't even know if they got the phone call. How do you know if they returned the phone call? Like, what are you talking about? Performance review? You don't know that then? And so how do you move the culture? How do you influence the culture? How do you shape a culture that became, I thought important enough to write the book? But then, you know, as I got into it more, the thing that I realized is that is what your company is. And I love the quote from the Way of the Samurai that I use in the book, which is like a culture is not set of beliefs, it's a set of actions. Which is why I called the book. What you do is who you are. It's not what you believe, it's not what you think, it's not what you tweet, it's what you do. It's not the values that you have, that's not who you are. Who you are is what you do. And in the Samurai they call them virtues because it's the behaviors. The behaviors are the culture, not the values. And that's why when people have 20 values, I'm like, well, how many of those behaviors do you have? Like, none. So your culture is hypocrisy. And so the book is really about, like, how do you get that behavior?
