Бен Хоровиц: What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Ben Horowitz 2019

Cover design by Andrew Guinn

Jacket photograph © Beowulf Sheehan

Ben Horowitz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Information on previously published material appears here .

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Source ISBN: 9780008356118

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008356132

Version: 2019-09-24

This is for all the people serving time who did what they did, but are now doing something positive. I see what you are doing.

I know who you are.

One hundred percent of my portion of the proceeds of this book will go to help people coming out of prison change their culture and remain free, and to the people in Haiti trying to rebuild their society and return to the glory of their past.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page WHAT YOU DO IS WHO YOU ARE HOW TO CREATE YOUR BUSINESS CULTURE Ben Horowitz

Copyright

Dedication

Forewordby Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Introduction:What You Do Is Who You Are

1Culture and Revolution: The Story of Toussaint Louverture

2Toussaint Louverture Applied

3The Way of the Warrior

4The Warrior of a Different Way: The Story of Shaka Senghor

5Shaka Senghor Applied

6Genghis Khan, Master of Inclusion

7Inclusion in the Modern World

8Be Yourself, Design Your Culture

9Edge Cases and Object Lessons

10Final Thoughts

Author’s Note

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Ben Horowitz

About the Publisher

In the secular bible that launched the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro: An Interpretation , the indefatigable black bibliophile Arturo Schomburg argued in his essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past” that for too long “the Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture.” The Puerto Rican–born Schomburg didn’t just write about recovering this subsumed culture in white America; he recentered it by amassing one of history’s greatest collections of manuscripts, art, and rare artifacts, which eventually provided the foundation for one of the crown jewels of the New York Public Library system: Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a fortress of learning and enlightenment located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard in the heart of historic Harlem.

Almost a century later, another visionary in our midst, the Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur Ben Horowitz, has produced a fascinating volume at the intersection of business, leadership, and culture studies that rests on the same intellectual foundation as the mighty Schomburg. There is a lesson within a lesson at play in these pages. Instead of turning out one more book using winning case studies on the importance of fostering a thriving, mutually supportive workplace culture, Horowitz roots his own definition of innovation in the deliberate choices he makes to center the leadership stories of present, past, and long past people of color far outside the C-suite or open floor plans of today’s tech giants. They include Toussaint Louverture, the genius behind the only successful slave rebellion in the history of the western hemisphere, the Haitian Revolution of the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century; the samurai of Japan, whose bushido code elevated virtues above values; Genghis Khan, the ultimate outsider who led one of history’s most dominant armies by absorbing the best and brightest among those he defeated; and, perhaps most moving of all, James White, aka Shaka Senghor, who, on a devastating murder conviction, stepped out of quarantine into the belly of the Michigan prison system to become the leader of a violent squad called the Melanics that, over time, he shepherded toward a culture revolution focused on community uplift after prison.

By placing these dynamic figures at the center of his study, Horowitz underscores his own reputation as one of the tech industry’s most philosophically committed innovators—someone who defines creation not as the execution of an already good idea but as an original one that is so cutting edge that it is considered contrarian at best. Here, Horowitz is out to persuade readers to adopt his experiential view that the most robust, sustainable cultures are those based on action, not words; an alignment of personality and strategy; an honest awareness and assessment of the norms imbibed on the first day of work by new—not veteran—employees grasping at what it will take to make it; an openness to including outside talent and perspectives; a commitment to explicit ethics and principled virtues that stand out and have meaning; and, not least, a willingness to come up with “shocking rules” within an organization that indelibly and inescapably prompt others to ask, “Why?”