A very subjective review of “What You Do Is Who You Are”
Photo credit: Amazon
When and why I read this book
I read this book the week it came out in late 2019 because I had really enjoyed reading Ben Horowitz’s first and iconic book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
I was interested to read his take on a seemingly nebulous concept like company culture.
I bought the hard copy at the Book Passage bookstore at the Ferry Building in San Francisco and read it in three days.
How I felt reading this book
First, there is something I enjoy about the feeling of reading a book in the place the author is from or where the subject matter is set. I knew Ben Horowitz grew up in Oakland and I sat looking at the Bay Bridge for much of the time I read this book. A lot of the references in the book are to Bay Area companies, which I also admittedly enjoyed.
Secondly, company culture is something I’m genuinely fascinated by. My own experiences of company culture are wide-ranging—I’ve worked in retail at a mall for a couple of years during university, I’ve worked as an attorney in large private law firms in 3 different countries, in growth and strategy for an early-stage tech startup in SF, I’ve been active on many different committees and communities, and I’ve even started and led people in my own company. I also love reading articles on this topic so it didn’t take much for me to gobble up this book.
My 2-Sentence Review
The book presents a clear, explicit thesis on what company culture is and what it isn’t – illustrated through examples from history (like the Haitian revolution) and then grounded in modern case-studies (like the culture of competitiveness at Uber, collaboration at Slack, and even the leaked emails in the Hillary Clinton campaign).
For me, the book allows you to do two things – establish a more clearly articulated concept of what company culture is and secondly, to have a reference for actionable techniques to make your own company culture do what you want it to.
Interested in a Contrary View?
I think it’s healthy to read other perspectives to inform your view so here’s a link to some reviews contrary to my own:
The only comment I have is that the criticisms in these reviews are around the depth of the historical analysis and I don’t think that’s where the book’s major value is intended to be.
3 Quotes I Liked and Why
(1) This quote because it gives a real, adoptable understanding of company culture.
So I asked myself, How many of the following questions can be resolved by turning to your corporate goals or mission statement?... ‘Is that phone call so important I need to return it today, or can it wait till tomorrow?’… ‘Is the quality of this document good enough or should I keep working on it?’… ‘Do I have to be on time for that meeting?’…
The answer is zero.
There aren’t any ‘right answers’ to those questions. The right answers for your company depend on what your company is, what it does, and what it wants to be. In fact, how your employees answer these kinds of questions is your culture. Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you are not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.
(2) This quote because identifying biases is never easy and it’s great when a book can identify it and also when it calls itself out.
Companies—just like gangs, armies, and nations—are large organizations that rise or fall because of the daily microbehaviors of the human beings that compose them. But figuring out whether the root cause of a company’s success is its culture or some other factor isn’t easy. 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.
(3) This quote because it’s a reminder that different cultures can and do exist within the same company.
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.
3 Themes I Liked
That company culture can and should be designed. The risk is that if there’s no design, then a non-intentional culture will be created regardless – “That’s the nature of culture. It’s not a single decision – it’s a code that manifests itself as a vast set of actions taken over time.”
A strong nod to ethics. Ethics should be made explicit. It shouldn’t be assumed that everyone will just ‘do the right thing’ and I like that the book acknowledges that ethical breaches are the most dangerous breaches. “Spelling out what your organization must never do is the best way to inoculate yourself against bugs that cause ethical breaches.”
Techniques for action. Creating a culture is difficult so having tools to help is significant—the book sets out a cultural checklist, sets out decision-making styles, and keys to assigning meaning in difficult circumstances—some would describe it as gimmicky; I file it under “useful”.
Overall, a really worthwhile read that I would wholly recommend to anyone who interacts with company culture (a whole lot of people I assume).