What You Do Is Who You Are

by Ben Horowitz

  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.

  Make Decisions That Demonstrate Cultural Priorities

  The more counterintuitive the leader’s decision, the stronger the impact on the culture. Louverture set his culture by making one of the most counterintuitive decisions of the revolution.

  Once the rebels won control of the island, many of Louverture’s soldiers wanted revenge on the plantation owners. It would have been the course of least resistance for Louverture to order the owners shot out of hand. They would certainly have done the same to him. But he abhorred the spirit of revenge, believing it would destroy rather than elevate the culture.

  He also had to fund his war against France. If his country went bankrupt, his revolution would fail. Crops were the entire economy of Saint-Domingue: without them, it could never be an important nation. As Louverture declared, “The guarantee of the liberty of the blacks is the prosperity of agriculture.” He knew that plantations had to remain large to be economically viable, and that the owners had the knowledge, education, and experience the colony needed to keep the plantations going.

  So Louverture not only let the plantation owners live, he let them keep their land. But he insisted that they pay their laborers one-fourth of the profits. And he ordered them to live on their plantations, so they would be directly accountable for paying their workers and treating them well. If they disobeyed, their land was confiscated.

  With these decisions, Louverture established what a thousand speeches could not have: that the revolution wasn’t about revenge and that the economic well-being of the colony was its highest priority. It was all very well for him to say “no reprisals,” but it was what he did that set the culture.

  Walk the Talk

  No culture can flourish without the enthusiastic participation of its leader. No matter how well designed, carefully programmed, and insistently enforced your cultural elements are, inconsistent or hypocritical behavior by the person in charge will blow the whole thing up.

  Imagine a CEO who decides that punctuality is critical to her company’s culture. She delivers eloquent speeches about how being on time is a matter of respect. She points out that employee time is the company’s most valuable asset, so that when you show up late, you are effectively robbing your colleagues. But she then shows up late to all her meetings. How many employees will adhere to that value?

  Louverture understood this perfectly. He asked a great deal from his soldiers, but he was more than willing to embody his own standards. He lived with the men in his army and shared their labors. If a cannon had to be moved, he pitched in, once getting a hand badly crushed in the process. He charged at his troops’ head, something Europe had rarely seen from a leader since Alexander the Great, and was wounded seventeen times.

  Louverture began building trust by being trustworthy himself. As C. L. R. James observed, “By his incessant activity on their behalf he gained their confidence, and among a people ignorant, starving, badgered, and nervous, Louverture’s word by 1796 was law—the only person in the North whom they could be depended upon to obey.”

  Because the culture he wanted was a straight reflection of his own values, Louverture walked the talk better than most. His commandment against revenge was put to the test after he defeated his rival André Rigaud, a mulatto commander in the South, in the bloody War of Knives. Rigaud had not only rebelled against Louverture, but he had scoffed at the basis of his authority, proclaiming that the caste system, which put mulattoes just below whites and blacks at the bottom, was correct. Facing Rigaud’s last supporters, Louverture delivered his verdict: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Return to your duty, I have already forgotten everything.”

  For a culture to stick, it must reflect the leader’s actual values, not just those he thinks sound inspiring. Because a leader creates culture chiefly by his actions—by example.

  Make Ethics Explicit

  Every company likes to believe it has integrity, but if you asked its employees you’d hear a different story. The trouble with implementing integrity is that it is an abstract, long-term concept. Will integrity get you an extra deal this quarter? Unlikely. In fact, it may do the opposite. Will it make your product ship a week early? No chance. So why do we care about it?

  Integrity, honesty, and decency are long-term cultural investments. Their purpose is not to make the quarter, beat a competitor, or attract a new employee. Their purpose is to create a better place to work and to make the company a better one to do business with in the long run. This value does not come for free. In the short run it may cost you deals, people, and investors, which is why most companies cannot bring themselves to actually, really, enforce it. But as we’ll see, the failure to enforce good conduct often brings modern companies to their knees.

  One difficulty in implementing integrity is that it’s a concept without boundaries. You can’t pat yourself on the back for treating your employees ethically if you’re simultaneously lying to your customers, because your employees will pick up on the discrepancy and start lying to each other. The behaviors must be universal; you have to live up to them in every context.

  Understanding this, Louverture painstakingly, systematically, and relentlessly moved his slave army to higher and higher levels of conduct. He was not playing a short-term game; he was determined to create an army, and then a country, that people would be proud to be a part of. Because he was determined not just to win the revolution, but to build a great country, he knew he had to take the long view.

  Louverture’s new state would be based on personal industry, social morality, public education, religious toleration, free trade, civic pride, and racial equality. He emphasized that attaining these goals would be each person’s responsibility: “Learn, citizens, to appreciate the glory of your new political status. In acquiring the rights that the constitution affords all Frenchman, do not forget the duties it imposes on you.” His instructions to his army were particularly direct: “Do not disappoint me . . . do not permit the desire for booty to turn you aside . . . it will be time enough to think of material things when we have driven the enemy from our shores. We are fighting that liberty—the most precious of earthly possessions—may not perish.”

  Crucially, Louverture’s ethical instruction was explicit. Often CEOs will be exceptionally explicit about goals such as shipping products, but silent on matters such as obeying the law. This can be fatal. It’s because integrity is often at odds with other goals that it must be clearly and specifically inserted into the culture. If a company expects its people to behave ethically without giving them detailed instructions on what that behavior looks like and how to pursue it, the company will fall far short no matter whom it hires.

  This is why Louverture underlined his instructions with strict enforcement. Pamphile de Lacroix, a French general who fought against Louverture, wrote, “Never was a European army subjected to more severe discipline than that observed by Louverture’s troops.” The contrast with the French was stark. As C. L. R. James observed, “The soldier emigres, Dessources and some others, vicomtes, and chevaliers, broke the terms of the amnesty, destroyed cannon and ammunition dumps, killed all the animals, and set plantations on fire. Louverture’s Africans, on the other hand, starving and half-naked, marched into the towns, and such was their discipline that no single act of violence or pillage was committed.”

  When Louverture’s own army was starving during its campaign against the British, he nonetheless gave food to destitute local white women. He wrote: “My heart is torn at the fate which has befallen some unhappy whites who have been victims of this business.” The women reported the assistance that they had received from this “astonishing man,” and called the ugly old ex-slave their father. If you stop reading this book and go tell your friends that the slave who led the Haitian Revolution was called “Father” by the white
women of the colony, they won’t believe you, because it’s unbelievable. But it’s true. Such is the power of ethics.

  By 1801, Louverture’s massive investment in the culture began to pay off. With blacks and mulattoes running the country, cultivation had been restored to two-thirds of its peak level under the French. Integrity proved its worth.

  What Happened to Louverture?

  The end of Louverture’s story is dismaying. After Louverture wrote his constitution in 1801, Napoleon became furious at this display of independence and decided to overthrow him. The following year, Louverture’s second in command, the fierce General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, coordinated a double cross with Napoleon’s top general in Saint-Domingue. Louverture was arrested at a diplomatic meeting and sent by ship to France, where he would spend the brief remainder of his days being badly treated in a French jail. He died of a stroke and pneumonia on April 7, 1803. Meanwhile, Napoleon began restoring slavery throughout the Caribbean. It was this, in great part, that led Dessalines to turn against Napoleon. He united all rebel factions under him, defeated Napoleon’s army, and declared independence in January 1804. He changed the country’s name to Haiti, and later that year had himself proclaimed emperor.

  Dessalines completed the revolution that Louverture had spearheaded for so long, but he promptly made two decisions that Louverture would have abhorred: he ordered that most of the French whites in Haiti be put to death and he nationalized all private land, abruptly reversing much of the cultural and economic headway that Louverture had made. Though the French would eventually give Haiti diplomatic recognition in 1825, they would also exact cruel reparations for Dessalines’s shortsighted decisions, forcing Haiti to pay the modern equivalent of $21 billion for France’s loss of its slaves and plantations. These events continue to haunt the country, which remains the poorest in the Western world.

  Sad story, but how could it happen? How could Louverture, genius of culture and human nature that he was, not perceive the brewing treachery? In a sense, he was like the Greek hero Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx but who couldn’t clearly see those closest to him. Louverture’s optimistic view of human potential blinded him to certain home truths.

  Because Louverture believed in the French Revolution and the freedoms it claimed to embody, he saw Napoleon as an enlightened product of the revolution rather than as the racist he was. In one outburst, Napoleon said: “I will not rest until I have torn the epaulettes off every nigger in the colonies.”

  Because of Louverture’s loyalty to France, he didn’t declare independence when the French army invaded, which would have united the whole island behind him. He vacillated.

  And because Louverture trusted—all too much—that his army would trust him to act for the best, he didn’t grasp that his soldiers were restless about everything from his position on agriculture to his constant efforts to attain a diplomatic solution with France, to his rule against revenge. Louverture did not grasp the emotional power of retribution, whereas Dessalines did.

  C. L. R. James put it well: “If Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilization were of the slenderest. He saw what was right under his nose so well because he saw no further. Louverture’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not darkness.”

  Yet though Louverture’s culture proved tragically difficult for his flawed subordinate to live up to, it had an enduring power. After Napoleon captured Louverture, he attempted to reinstitute slavery on the island—but was beaten by the army Louverture left behind. Though he was already dead, Louverture defeated his third European superpower. Napoleon suffered more losses in Saint-Domingue than he would at Waterloo, and these reverses forced him to sell Louisiana and parts of fourteen additional states to the United States for $15 million. The French emperor later confessed that he should have ruled the island through Louverture.

  Historical Impact

  The slave revolution of Saint-Domingue got into the area’s bloodstream and spread from island to island in the Caribbean. Later rebellions in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Curacao, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Louisiana were attributable, at least in part, to Haitian agents and their followers. These rebellions influenced the eventual withdrawal of the French, British, and Spanish empires from the region.

  In the United States, Louverture inspired the abolitionist John Brown to launch the raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry, which Brown hoped would prompt the local slaves to rebel. The attack failed and Brown was hanged, but the Harpers Ferry raid escalated tensions that, a year later, led to the South’s secession and the Civil War.

  While one of the greatest culture geniuses in history was unable to permanently establish the way of life he hoped for in his home country, he helped shift the Western world from a culture of slavery to one of freedom.

  Toussaint Louverture made missteps that locked him up for life, yet he helped liberate us all.

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  Toussaint Louverture Applied

  I’m a murderer, n*gg*, but I don’t promote violence.

  —Gucci Mane

  The techniques Louverture used with rare ingenuity and skill work brilliantly at modern companies.

  Keep What Works

  When Steve Jobs returned to run Apple in 1997, the company was in bad shape. Really bad shape. Its market share had fallen from 13 percent when Jobs was fired in 1985 to 3.3 percent, and it was only a quarter’s worth of cash from insolvency. When rival computer maker Michael Dell was asked what should be done with Apple, he said, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

  Even within Apple, almost everyone believed the conventional wisdom that the company’s death spiral resulted from what was known as personal computer economics. The theory of PC economics held that because the industry had commoditized PC hardware—there were IBM knockoffs everywhere—the way to make money was not to be a vertically integrated provider that gave the user the machine and its operating system, but to focus on the horizontal option: selling an operating system to run on someone else’s hardware.

  Nearly every analyst was pushing Apple to make its Mac OS operating system the company’s product. In 1997, Wired proclaimed: “Admit it. You’re out of the hardware game.” Even Apple’s cofounder, Steve Wozniak, subscribed to this view: “We had the most beautiful operating system,” he said, “but to get it you had to buy our hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake.”

  Steve Jobs disregarded that advice. In fact, one of his first acts as CEO was to stop licensing Mac OS to other hardware providers.

  The industry’s other article of faith was that companies needed to maximize market share by having a presence in every link of the computer chain, from servers to printers to PCs to laptops. Likewise, they needed to make PCs in all shapes and sizes for every possible user. But Jobs immediately killed the majority of Apple’s products, including most of its PC models, as well as all of its servers and printers and its Newton handheld computer.

  Why? Jobs saw the situation entirely differently. At an early all-hands meeting he asked, “Okay, tell me what’s wrong with this place?” He answered his own question: “It’s the products!” He went on to inquire, “So what’s wrong with the products?” and to answer himself again: “The products suck!”

  For Jobs, the issue was not the economic structure of the PC industry. Apple just needed to build better products. He would need to transform its culture to make that happen, but it would only happen if he built upon Apple’s strengths, not Microsoft’s.

  Integrating hardware and software had always been Apple’s core strength. At its peak, the company had focused not on industry benchmarks like processor speeds and storage capacity, but on building products such as the MacIntosh that encouraged people’s creativity. Apple did integration better than anyone else. Part of the magic was its ability to control the entire product, from the user interface to the precise color of the hardware. Jobs went out of his
way to keep the employees who understood this, user-experience perfectionists like him. Jobs said about one such employee, the great designer Jony Ive, “He understands what we do at our core better than anyone.”

  The company’s famous Think Different advertising campaign, which launched in 1997, featured creative geniuses such as Gandhi, John Lennon, and Albert Einstein. Jobs explained: “We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.” For Apple to become great again, it had to build on the aspect of its culture that had distinguished it in the past.

  Jobs narrowed the product line to ensure that the company focused on delivering great experiences to individual humans rather than an impersonal set of specs, feeds, and speeds aimed at no one in particular. Over time, he would expand to include iPods, iPads, and iPhones, but he never went “horizontal”—he kept the software and hardware integrated. To further control the customer experience, Jobs even opened Apple Stores, which would become one of the best-performing retail businesses in the world.

  When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, it was ninety days from broke. As of this writing, it is the most valuable company in the world.

  When Apple was an industry joke, it must have been tempting to purge the old culture entirely. Jobs’s predecessor, Gil Amelio, tried to do just that. But like Louverture, the former slave who preserved the best parts of slave culture within his army, Jobs, the former founder, knew that Apple’s original strengths should be the foundation of its new mission.

  Create Shocking Rules

  Here are the rules for writing a rule so powerful it sets the culture for many years: