My take-aways from Ben Horowitz’s book “What you do is who you are”. **Spoiler-alert**

Being a serial entrepreneur and a tech CEO for the last 4 years, I am very thankful to Ben Horowitz for both of his books. This particular book had arrived to my desk right on time, thanks to my son and advisor in business Sander Gansen, in the middle of merging my company Shipitwise with our new strategic partner Speys. Two teams, two cultures, two management styles have to become one. I got tons of useful notes from this book we can implement right away to make our united team unbeatable.

These are my notes from this great book. **Spoiler alert**

You culture is how your company makes decisions when you are not there.

If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental.

If you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard.

Coaching, and not direction, is the first quality of leadership now. Get the barriers out of the way to let people do the things they do well.

If anyone could instantly understand the idea, it wouldn’t be innovative.

Since tech became a consumer phenomenon, thousands of nontech people have come up with great ideas that use technology. But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail.

If I believed there is no tomorrow, then there can be no trust. Without trust, communication breaks.

As an organization grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.

Building a great culture means adapting it to circumstances. And that often means bringing in outside leadership from the culture you need to penetrate or master.

If you are on time, you are late. Meetings start five minutes early.

If you’re negotiating something in the margin, it’s OK to give it to our partner.

There are no extra points for growing head count, budget size or fixed experiences.

You are either selling or being sold on the reason why customer ain’t buying your product.

Four C’s of corporate sales: Competence, Confidence, Courage, Conviction

When you are a leader, even your accidental actions set the culture.

Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but every culture has bugs. It’s impossible to design a bug-free culture. But it’s vital to understand, that the most dangerous bugs are the ones that cause ethical breaches.

When it comes to ethics, you have to explain “why”. Ethics are about hard choices.

The reason so many efforts to establish “corporate values” are basically worthless is that they emphasize beliefs instead of actions. Culturally, what you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are.

If you’re not honoring the culture yourself, nobody believes you.
A constant contact is one of the best techniques for changing the culture. Nothing signals the importance of an issue like daily meeting about it. If you want to change who you are, you have to change the culture you are in.

What must employees do to survive in your organization? What behaviors get them included in, or excluded from, the power base? What gets them ahead?

The best way to understand your culture is not through what managers tell you, but through how new employees behave.

What people do at the office, where they spend most of their waking hours, becomes who they are. Cultural behaviors, once absorbed, get deployed everywhere.

The way you treat your partner will eventually be the way your employees treat each other.

Virtues are superior to values.

Collaborative people know that their success is limited by uncollaborative people, so they are either going to help those people raise their game or they are going to get rid of them.

The first step in getting the culture you want is knowing what you want.

Whether the company is a start up or 100 years old, designing your culture is always relevant. cultures, like the organizations that create them, must evolve to meet new challenges.

While you can draw inspiration from other cultures, don’t try to adopt another organization’s way. For your culture to be vibrant and sustainable, it must come from the blood, from the soul.

Step one in designing a successful culture is to be yourself. That’s not easy.

There are parts of CEO’s personality that he doesn’t actually want in the company. Think carefully about what your flaws are, because you don’t want to program them into a culture — or else leading by example will bite you in the ass.

One part of my personality that didn’t work so well in a software company was my willingness to engage in endless, unstructured conversations.

I learned to counterprogram the culture against my inclinations in three ways.
1. I surround myself with people, who had the opposite personality trait. They wanted to finish the conversation as soon as possible and move on to the next thing.
2. I made rules to help manage myself. If a meeting was called without a tightly phrased written agenda and the desired outcome, we’d cancel it.
3. I announced to the company that we were committed to running meetings efficiently, talking the talk.

Pick the virtues that will help your company accomplish it’s mission.

In sales, if you take what you’re told at face value, you won’t last.

If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail.

The most important element of any corporate culture is that people care. They care about the quality of their work, they care about the mission, they care about being good citizens, they care about the company winning.

Customer virtue is a great value — until it’s not. Customers do indeed have strong views about features they’d like in product they already have, but they have fuzzy to nonexistent ideas about products that don’t yet exist.

“Everyone has input, then I decide” tends to balance informed decision making with speed.

It’s critical to healthy culture that whatever your decision making process, you insist on a strict rule of disagree and commit. If you are a manager, at any level, you have a fundamental responsibility to support every decision that gets made. You can disagree in the meeting, but afterword you must not only support the final decision, you must be able to compellingly articulate the reasons the decision was made.

Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

Your company‘s culture should be idiosyncratic expression of your personality, beliefs, and strategy — and it should keep evolving as your company grows and conditions change.

Be it a deal gone bad, a whiffed quarter, or a layoff, this is your chance to define not only the event, but the character of your company.

If you find a problem, do a root-cause analysis and figure out what caused it. You will almost always find that the underlying issue was communication or prioritization or some other soluble problem rather than particularly lazy or idiotic employee.

Loyalty is about the quality of your relationship. People don’t leave companies, they leave managers. If there is no relationship between a manager and an employee or, worse, a bad relationship, you won’t get loyalty regardless of your cultural policy.

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.