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

Ben Horowitz, a number one enterprise capitalist, trendy administration professional, and New York Times best-selling writer, combines classes each from historical past and from trendy organizational observe with sensible and infrequently shocking recommendation to assist executives construct cultures that may climate each good and unhealthy occasions.

Ben Horowitz has lengthy been fascinated by historical past, and notably by how individuals behave in a different way than you’d anticipate. The time and circumstances during which they had been raised typically shapes them – but just a few leaders have managed to form their occasions. In What You Do Is Who You Are, he turns his consideration to a query essential to each group: how do you create and maintain the tradition you need?

To Horowitz, tradition is how an organization makes selections. It is the set of assumptions workers use to resolve on a regular basis issues: Should I keep on the Red Roof Inn, or the Four Seasons? Should we focus on the colour of this product for 5 minutes or 30 hours? If tradition will not be purposeful, it will likely be an accident or a mistake.

What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your tradition purposeful by spotlighting 4 fashions of management and culture-building – the chief of the one profitable slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the Samurai, who dominated Japan for 700 years and formed trendy Japanese tradition; Genghis Khan, who constructed the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, a person convicted of homicide who ran essentially the most formidable jail gang within the yard and in the end reworked jail tradition.

Horowitz connects these management examples to trendy case-studies, together with how Louverture’s cultural strategies had been utilized (or ought to have been) by Reed Hastings at Netflix, Travis Kalanick at Uber, and Hillary Clinton, and the way Genghis Khan’s imaginative and prescient of cultural inclusiveness has parallels within the work of Don Thompson, the primary African-American CEO of McDonalds, and of Maggie Wilderotter, the CEO who led Frontier Communications. Horowitz then affords steering to assist any firm perceive its personal technique and construct a profitable tradition.

What You Do Is Who You Are is a journey by means of tradition, from historic to trendy. Along the best way, it solutions a query basic to any group: Who are we? How do individuals discuss us after we’re not round? How can we deal with our prospects? Are we there for individuals in a pinch? Can we be trusted?

Who you’re will not be the values you listing on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide assembly. It’s not your advertising marketing campaign. It’s not even what you imagine. Who you’re is what you do. This audiobook goals to show you how to do the stuff you want to develop into the sort of chief you need to be – and others need to observe.