What You Do Is Who You Are

by Ben Horowitz

  As Louverture explained, “We are fighting that liberty—the most precious of earthly possessions—may not perish.” When it comes to ethics, you have to explain the “why.” Why can’t you pillage? Because pillaging would corrupt the real goal, which isn’t winning, but liberty. In other words, if you win in the wrong way, what do you actually win? If you fight in a manner that strips liberty from bystanders, how will you ever build a free society? And if you don’t build a free society, what are you fighting for? Louverture treated an army of illiterate former slaves as if they were philosophers, and they rose to the challenge.

  After Uber’s board ousted Kalanick and brought in a new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, Khosrowshahi immediately replaced the offending cultural values with the following new ones:

  We build globally, we live locally.

  We are customer obsessed.

  We celebrate differences.

  We act like owners.

  We persevere.

  We value ideas over hierarchy.

  We make big bold bets.

  We do the right thing. Period.

  The key one was “We do the right thing. Period.”

  Kalanick’s code was dangerous but unique—only Uber had it. The new values are safer—but they could be anyone’s.

  Look again at the new code’s ethical injunction: We do the right thing. Period. Khosrowshahi is a strong CEO and likely has a comprehensive plan to program his values into the culture. But when we compare his precept to Louverture’s, there’s a clear gap in precision.

  What, exactly, does “Do the right thing” mean?

  And how does “Period” clarify that?

  Does “Do the right thing” mean make the quarter or tell the truth? Does it mean use your judgment or obey the law? Does it mean you can excuse losses by claiming some moral imperative? Will employees who are hired from a culture like Facebook have a different view of “Do the right thing” than employees hired from Oracle?

  Louverture spelled out what “Do the right thing” meant: don’t pillage, don’t cheat on your wife, take responsibility for yourself, personal industry, social morality, public education, religious toleration, free trade, civic pride, racial equality, and on and on. His instructions were specific, emphatic, and unceasing.

  It’s also critical that leaders emphasize the “why” behind their values every chance they get, because the “why” is what gets remembered. The “what” is just another item in a giant stack of things you are supposed to do. So for Uber to merely say We do what’s right, period, means the company missed a big opportunity.

  Finally, “Do the right thing. Period,” makes the issue seem simple, and therefore trivial. But ethics is not easy; it’s complex. That’s why Louverture spoke to his slave army as though they were philosophers. He needed them to understand that they would have to think deeply about their choices.

  If you remember one thing, remember that ethics are about hard choices. Do you tell a little white lie to investors or do you lay off a third of the company? Do you get publicly embarrassed by a competitor or do you deceive a customer? Do you deny someone a raise that they need or do you make your company a little less fair?

  No matter how difficult such questions seem, your task will never be as challenging as implanting ethics in a slave army during a war.

  3

  The Way of the Warrior

  The shit I kick, ripping through the vest

  Biggie Smalls passing any test

  I’m ready to die.

  —Notorious B.I.G.

  The samurai, the warrior class of ancient Japan, had a powerful code we call “bushido,” or “the way of the warrior.” This code enabled the samurai to rule Japan from 1186 until 1868—nearly seven hundred years—and their beliefs endured long after their reign. The samurai are the taproot of Japanese culture to this day.

  Some of bushido’s tenets, selected from Shintoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, are thousands of years old, so portions of its playbook seem antiquated. Yet the culture persevered for so astonishingly long because it provided a framework for handling every situation or ethical dilemma you might come across. Bushido’s dictates were crisp, coherent, and comprehensive. The samurai’s meticulous approach to building a 360-degree culture is extraordinarily applicable today.

  What Did Culture Mean to the Samurai?

  Bushido looks like a set of principles, but it’s a set of practices. The samurai defined culture as a code of action, a system not of values but of virtues. A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody. 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.

  Even the samurai oath is oriented toward action:

  I will never fall behind others in pursuing the way of the warrior.

  I will always be ready to serve my lord.

  I will honor my parents.

  I will serve compassionately for the benefit of others.

  Hagakure, the most famous collection of samurai wisdom, instructs: “The extent of one’s courage or cowardice cannot be measured in ordinary times. All is revealed when something happens.”

  The Importance of Death

  A striking aspect of modern Japanese culture is the craftsmanship and attention to detail. From sushi makers to whiskey distillers to Kobe beef producers to car manufacturers, the Japanese focus on quality, and their proficiency in attaining it, is remarkable. Where did this culture of carefulness originate?

  It began with death. The most famous line in Hagakure is “The way of the warrior is to be found in dying.” Another crucial text, Bushido Shoshinshu, opens with one of the most shocking rules in any culture: “Keep death in mind at all times.” Of all the aspects of life you might want to meditate on constantly, death would seem like the last one on the list. Before studying the bushido, I would rather have watched Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump take each other on in a ten-hour dance competition than contemplate death.

  Bushido Shoshinshu explains the idea behind that contemplation:

  If you realize that the life that is here today is not certain on the morrow, then when you take your orders from your employer, and when you look in on your parents, you will have the sense that this may be the last time—so you cannot fail to become truly attentive to your employer and your parents.

  The text takes pains to describe what the concept doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean just sitting around waiting to die:

  If you face death in that way, loyalty and familial duty to your employer and parents will be neglected, and your professional warriorhood will wind up defective. This will never do.

  The idea is to take care of your public and private duties day and night, and then whenever you have free time when your mind is unoccupied, you think of death, bringing it to mind attentively.

  This rule was the foundation of the culture. Note how awareness of mortality underpinned both loyalty and scrupulous attention to detail. From Hagakure:

  Every morning, samurai would diligently groom themselves by bathing in the open air, shaving their foreheads, putting fragrant oil in their hair, cutting their fingernails and filing them with pumice stone, then polishing them with wood sorrel. Of course, military equipment was kept neat, dusted, and oiled to be free of rust. Although paying so much attention to personal appearance may seem vain, it is because of the samurai’s resolve to die at any moment that he makes preparations so meticulously. If slain with an unkempt appearance, he will be scorned by his enemy as being unclean.

  A warrior known as the Master Archer had a sign on his wall to remind him that he must be “Always on the Battlefield.” Devoted warriors would even wear a wooden sword to the bath, to keep themselves ever mindful of combat, readiness, and the potential for death.

  The biggest threat to your company’s culture is a time of crisis, a period when you’re getting crushed by th
e competition or are nearing bankruptcy. How do you focus on the task at hand if you might be killed at any moment? The answer: they can’t kill you if you’re already dead. If you’ve already accepted the worst possible outcome, you have nothing to lose. Hagakure commands you to imagine and accept the worst in gory detail:

  Begin each day pondering death as its climax. Each morning, with a calm mind, conjure images in your head of your last moments. See yourself being pierced by bow and arrow, gun, sword, or spear, or being swept away by a giant wave, vaulting into a fiery inferno, taking a lightning strike, being shaken to death in a great earthquake, falling hundreds of feet from a high cliff top, succumbing to a terminal illness, or just dropping dead unexpectedly. Every morning, be sure to meditate yourself into a trance of death.

  Meditating on your company’s downfall will enable you to build your culture the right way. Imagine you’ve gone bankrupt. Were you a great place to work? What was it like to do business with you? Did your encounters with people leave them better off or worse off? Did the quality of your products make you proud?

  Modern companies tend to focus on metrics like goals, missions, and quarterly numbers. They rarely ask why all their employees come to work every day. Is it for the money? What’s more valuable, the money or the time? My mentor, Bill Campbell, used to say, “We are doing it for each other. How much do you care about the people you’re working with? Do you want to let them down?”

  Whether your aim is to keep death in mind, to do it for each other, or some analogous formulation, the glue that binds a company culture is that the work must be meaningful for its own sake.

  Defining the Virtues

  The samurai code rested on eight virtues: Rectitude or justice, courage, honor, loyalty, benevolence, politeness, self-control, and veracity or sincerity. Each virtue was carefully defined and then reinforced through a set of principles, practices, and stories. They all worked together as a system, balancing one another in a way that made it very difficult for any individual virtue to be misunderstood or misused. Let’s zoom in on the virtues of honor, politeness, and veracity or sincerity to see how this works.

  Honor

  The samurai regarded honor as the immortal part of themselves. Without honor, every other virtue was worthless and bestial. The samurai took this idea to extremes that we would find, well, extreme. There is a famous story about a well-meaning citizen who called the attention of a samurai to a flea on his back, and was promptly cut in two for his pains. As fleas were parasites that fed on animals, the citizen had publicly identified the samurai as a beast, which was unpardonable.

  While I have sometimes thought about cutting someone in half for questioning my integrity in a meeting, that generally wouldn’t work in today’s world. But your individual reputation and honor should mean something within your company, and be at stake in everything you do. Does the integrity of that deal meet your standard? Does the quality of your team’s work measure up? Are you willing to put your name on it? If the customer or your competitor questions your behavior, are you comfortable knowing that you acted with honor?

  Still, if you could be summarily executed for a faux pas, that’s a problem. There had to be a complementary part of the culture that ordained how you should behave in all situations to avoid this kind of sudden death. Enter politeness.

  Politeness

  The politeness virtue consisted of a complex set of rules that determined how the samurai should behave in all situations—how he must bow, how he must walk and sit, even how he must drink tea.

  Though the specific rules may seem arbitrary, they were rooted in the belief that politeness is the most profound way to express love and respect for others. It wasn’t just rule-following, but a gateway to deeper intimacy.

  Bushido, Soul of Japan gives us an idea of how this concept still works in Japan:

  You are out in the hot, glaring sun with no shade over you; a Japanese acquaintance passes you by; you accost him, and instantly his hat is off—well, that is perfectly natural, but the “awfully funny” performance is, that all the while he talks with you his parasol is down and he stands in the glaring sun also. How foolish!—Yes, exactly so, provided the motive were less than this: “You are in the sun; I sympathise with you; I would willingly take you under my parasol if it were large enough, or if we were familiarly acquainted; as I cannot shade you, I will share your discomforts.”

  In the United States today, we get on Twitter and decry the lack of empathy in our country—and then we wonder why empathy keeps diminishing. A culture is not the sum of its outrage; it’s a set of actions. In a competitive corporate world, politeness might seem like a throwaway virtue. In fact, the way the samurai took the action-oriented nature of politeness and used it to express the abstract concepts of love and respect is exceptionally instructive.

  But how did the samurai get around the issue of being fake? How did they stop people from using politeness to feign respect, thereby creating a culture premised on duplicity? Again, their system came into play. The samurai combined the virtue of politeness with the virtue of veracity or sincerity. Specifically, they defined politeness without veracity as an empty gesture. Lying to be polite is politeness without form and has no value.

  Veracity or Sincerity

  The samurai notion of sincerity was influenced by Confucius, who wrote: “Sincerity is the end and the beginning of all things; without Sincerity there would be nothing.”

  The culture of veracity was so strong that a samurai’s word was considered the truth and written agreements were deemed unnecessary. This was reinforced in parenting, where children were raised on stories of being put to death for lying. Words were seen as sacred.

  This passage about Hiko’uemon, a samurai in the 1600s, illustrates the virtue:

  When Moro’oka Hiko’uemon was summoned, he was told to sign an oath to the deities that his testimony was true. “A samurai’s word is harder than metal. Once I have decided something, not even the gods can change it.” Consequently, he did not have to make an oath.

  Applying the Method

  When we started Andreessen Horowitz in 2009, the one virtue I knew I wanted in our culture was respect for the entrepreneur. Venture capitalists (VCs) depend on entrepreneurs for their existence, and I wanted our culture to reflect that. The systemic problem was that as entrepreneurs asked venture capitalists for funding, VCs tended to see themselves as in the commanding role. Many carried themselves accordingly.

  I took a samurai-style approach. First, we defined the virtue thoroughly, taking pains to note what it did not mean:

  We respect the intense struggle of the entrepreneurial process and we know that without the entrepreneurs we have no business. When dealing with entrepreneurs, we always show up on time and we always get back to them timely and with substantive feedback, even if it’s bad news (like a rejection). We have an optimistic view of the future and believe that entrepreneurs, whether they succeed or fail, are working to help us achieve a better future. As a result, we never publicly criticize any entrepreneur or startup (doing so is a fireable offense).

  This does not mean that we leave CEOs in place forever. Our obligation is to the company not the founder. If the founder is no longer capable of running the company, the founder will not remain as CEO.

  Yet there was still an opportunity for people to misinterpret this virtue as “never saying anything negative to an entrepreneur,” so we paired it with another virtue:

  We tell the truth even if it hurts. When talking to an entrepreneur, an LP [limited partner], a partner, or each other, we strive to tell the truth. We are open and honest. We do not withhold material information or tell half truths. Even if the truth will be difficult to hear or to say, we err on the side of truth in the face of difficult consequences.

  We do not, however, dwell on trivial truths with the intention of hurting people’s feelings or making them look bad. We tell the truth to make people better not worse.

  To cement this practice in o
ur culture, we focused not on the value of respect, but on the virtue of being on time. If you were late for a meeting with an entrepreneur, you had to pay a fine of ten dollars per minute. Avoiding the fine took practice and hard work, and embedded a number of great habits into our culture. You had to plan your previous meeting correctly, so it wouldn’t conflict with the meeting with the entrepreneur. You not only had to end that meeting with discipline, but you had to run it with discipline, so everything got done in the time allotted. You had to avoid being distracted by random texts or emails. You even had to think about when to go to the restroom.

  We didn’t collect much in fines—less than one thousand dollars, most of it early on—because the threat of the fine made everyone constantly aware of being punctual and of the respect owed the entrepreneur.

  Other VCs as well as the people covering the industry misinterpreted the virtue and referred to it as “founder friendly,” a massive corruption of the concept that has delivered us a competitive advantage for years. Being “founder friendly” implies that you take the founder’s side even when he is mistaken. This kind of “virtue” helps nobody. In fact, it creates a culture of lies. Any time you decide one group is inherently good or bad regardless of their behavior, you program dishonesty into your organization.

  Making the Culture Last

  In America, parents have trouble convincing their children to stay polite for a single dinner party. How did the entire country of Japan embrace politeness for more than ten centuries? It helped that the samurai required everyone to study the code, commit it to memory, and live it every day—but other cultures have required that kind of study, and they didn’t last nearly as long. The samurai endured because of two additional techniques. First, they detailed every permutation of potential cultural or ethical dilemmas to prevent the code from being misinterpreted or deliberately misused. Second, they stamped their code deep with vivid stories.