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

Author: Ben Horowitz

I somehow find it difficult to wrap my head around the titles of Ben Horowitz’ books. The first book I read was “The hard thing about hard things” which seemed kind of obvious and repetitive and now this one is called  “What you do is who you are”, which also doesn’t seem particularly insightful. Unlike the title, however, the book is quite straightforward and is about the importance of culture to an organization. 

Horowitz starts out by looking at the eighteenth century sugar cane plantations of Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti), where enslaved Africans planted, harvested and processed sugar cane. Like in other plantations any attempt to resist was met with severe punishments, often ending in death. Ultimately, led by a former slave, Toussaint Loverture, they overthrew slavery to establish the Republic of Haiti. Horowitz argues that slavery, by design, eliminates any type of culture taking root in the population. He examines how Toussaint Loverture, overcame this setback and was able to build a culture among slaves that culminated in their freedom. 

He cites many other examples from Genghis Khan to prison gangs that are interesting in their own right. I got the feeling that Horowitz runs fast and loose with these stories and conveniently prescribes a culture and then goes on to attribute their success to this culture. Even though the history is debatable, but the lessons in culture are relevant and applicable to most organizations. 

It's fun to look at culture from the lens of computer science. Horowitz says that “Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs.”  Maybe he should have taken his analogy seriously and refrained from debugging cultures that he did not have a first hand view of!