What You Do Is Who You Are

by Ben Horowitz

  A hallmark of the code was its detailed consideration of potential circumstances. Recall Uber’s terse “We do the right thing. Period.” Now consider the Bushido Shoshinshu:

  There are three ways of doing right.

  Suppose you are going somewhere with an acquaintance who has a hundred ounces of gold and wants to leave it at your house until returning, instead of taking the trouble to carry it with him. Suppose you take the gold and put it away where no one can find it. Now suppose your companion dies during the trip, perhaps from food poisoning or stroke. No one else knows he left gold at your house, and no else knows you have it.

  Under these circumstances, if you have no thought but of sorrow for the tragedy, and you report the gold to the relatives of the deceased, sending it to them as soon as possible, then you can truly be said to have done right.

  Now suppose the man with the gold was just an acquaintance, not such a close friend. No one knows about the gold he left with you, so there will be no inquiries. You happen to be in tight circumstances at the moment, so this is a bit of luck; why not just keep quiet about it?

  If you are ashamed to find such thoughts occurring to you, and so you change your mind and return the gold to the rightful heirs, you could be said to have done right out of a sense of shame.

  Now suppose someone in your household—maybe your wife, your children, or your servants—knows about the gold. Suppose you return the gold to the legitimate heirs out of shame for any designs anyone in your household might conceive, and out of fear for the legal consequences. Then you should be said to do right out of shame in relation to others.

  But what would you do if no one knew about it at all?

  The story makes no ultimate distinction between doing right for “the right reasons” or out of shame or guilt. Why you do right is not important. Doing right is all that counts. But the people who created the code understood that doing right is harder in some circumstances than others, so they provided case studies.

  Will you do the right thing only if you risk getting caught for not doing it? How about if you don’t really risk getting caught? How about if you know nobody will know, nobody will miss getting the money, you don’t have a relationship with the person, and you really need the money? That last scenario is particularly challenging. If you don’t clarify exactly what “the right thing” is for a tough call like that, it won’t be totally clear what your employees should do when they come to one—and tough calls are what define a company and a culture.

  Stories

  You can read all you want to about the virtue of loyalty, but one vivid story from Hagakure brings it to life:

  The family history of Lord Soma is recorded in a scroll called the Chiken Marokashi. It was an unequaled family genealogy in Japan. The lord’s mansion suddenly caught fire one year. Lord Soma lamented: “I do not bemoan the loss of the manor and its fittings. They can all be replaced if they are destroyed in the fire. Regrettably, though, I couldn’t retrieve our treasured heirloom, the family tree.”

  One of his attendants declared: “I shall enter the flames and save this treasure.” Lord Soma and the other retainers chortled incredulously, “How can you salvage it now when the building is engulfed by this fire?” The retainer was never effusive in service, nor had he ever been exceptionally useful, but for some reason his lord was fond of him as he was diligent. “By no means have I been an effective servant to His Lordship because of my clumsiness. Nevertheless, I have always been ready to sacrifice my life for something useful should the opportunity arise. I believe that time is now.” With that, he stormed into the blazing inferno.

  As soon as the fire had been put out, Lord Soma instructed his men, “Find his body. It is such a shame!” They searched through the burnt ruins and finally located his charred remains in the garden area next to the residence. Blood gushed from his stomach as they turned his prostrated body over. Evidently he had slit open his belly and inserted the document inside, protecting it from the flames. Henceforth, it became known as the Chi-keizu or “Blood Genealogy.”

  Telling this story was a nearly perfect way to embed loyalty. The retainer was a mediocre person leading a mediocre life, but with one heroic act, he became immortal. How can anyone forget him carving a hole in himself to save the scroll? Let alone the ringing name given the document he preserved: Blood Genealogy.

  Stories and sayings define cultures. John Morgridge, the CEO of Cisco from 1988 to 1995, wanted every spare nickel spent on the business. But as many of his employees had come from free-spending cultures, simply reminding them to be frugal didn’t get his point across. Morgridge walked the talk by staying at the Red Roof Inn, but even his example didn’t prove truly contagious. So he came up with a pithy axiom: “If you cannot see your car from your hotel room, then you are paying too much.” When his top executives heard that, they understood that business-class tickets and fancy dinners were out of the question. More subtly—but even more crucially—they understood that the point of business travel was to meet customer needs, not to enjoy perks.

  When I was at Netscape Communications in the early days, we operated like a debate club. A debate club where everyone wanted to weigh in on every decision and then, if they lost, to revisit the decision as often as possible. We couldn’t get any work done because we were unwilling to commit the flag and move on.

  When Jim Barksdale became the company’s CEO in 1995, he knew he had to change that culture. But how? Create a cultural value telling people to disagree and commit? While disagree and commit is a great decision-making rule, as I’ll discuss later, it’s not easy to insert it into a culture accustomed to doing the opposite. Imagine being in a heated debate and hearing someone say, “Let’s disagree and commit.” You’d respond, “Commit to what? My idea or yours?”

  So what did Barksdale do? He created a piece of lore so memorable it outlived the company itself. At a company all-hands he said:

  We have three rules here at Netscape. The first rule is if you see a snake, don’t call committees, don’t call your buddies, don’t form a team, don’t get a meeting together, just kill the snake.

  The second rule is don’t go back and play with dead snakes. Too many people waste too much time on decisions that have already been made.

  And the third rule of snakes is: all opportunities start out looking like snakes.

  That story was so clear and so funny that nearly everyone got the point immediately. If you didn’t, everyone else was very excited to retell you the story. We told the story over and over again and the company changed. Once people realized that killing the snake was much more important than how we killed it, our new culture unleashed a flurry of creative energy. As the company bringing the Internet to life, we faced many snakes. The Internet had no security, so we invented Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The Internet had no way of maintaining browser state between sessions, so we invented cookies. The Internet couldn’t be programmed easily, so we invented JavaScript. Were these the optimal solutions? Probably not. But those snakes died fast, we never played with them again, and the technologies we created still dominate the Internet.

  Why did the bushido have such a profound impact on Japanese society? The complex answer is that the samurai developed and refined their culture continuously over a very long period of time, using a variety of psychologically sophisticated techniques to make it feel indelible, inescapable, and completely natural.

  The simple answer is that they kept death in mind at all times.

  4

  The Warrior of a Different Way

  The Story of Shaka Senghor

  Let a n*gg* try me, try me

  I’ma get his whole mutherfuckin’ family

  And I ain’t playin’ with nobody

  Fuck around and I’ma catch a body

  —Dej Loaf

  Shaka Senghor did not grow up in ancient Japan, but perhaps he should have. Philosophical, highly disciplined, and ferocious when he has to be, he would have been well suited to samurai lif
e. But he grew up in inner-city Detroit and became a warrior of a different way.

  I first met Senghor in 2015 through an unusual set of circumstances. I was scheduled to interview Oprah Winfrey after Andreessen Horowitz screened her new OWN show Belief. Interviewing arguably the best interviewer of my generation was more than a little intimidating. It felt like I had to give Albert Einstein a pop quiz on the special theory of relativity. I asked Oprah if she wouldn’t mind riding with me to the interview, so that she could school me on the art of drawing people out and help me avoid total embarrassment.

  In the car, she said, “The first thing you need to know is that you cannot work off a list of questions, because if you do you won’t listen and you will miss the most important question: the follow-up question.” A great point, but one I already understood. I said, “I need to know how you ask people really aggressive questions and, instead of getting defensive, they open up and start crying.” She said:

  Well, before I interview anyone I start by asking what their intentions are and I say, “I will help you get those intentions, but you have to trust me.” I’ll give you an example. Last week I was filming my show Super Soul Sunday and I had this guest on, Shaka Senghor, who had just spent nineteen years in prison, seven in solitary confinement for a murder he did commit. He had big muscles, dreadlocks, tattoos, and looked very scary. I asked him what his intentions were and he said, “It’s my intention to let people know that you shouldn’t be defined by the very worst thing that you have ever done in your life. People can be redeemed.” I said, “I got it and will help you get it, but you have to trust me.”

  So we start filming and I ask him, “When did you turn to crime?” He said, “I hit the streets when I was fourteen years old.” But I had read his book. So I said, “What about that time when you were nine years old and you came home with a perfect report card and your mother threw a pot at your head? How did that make you feel?” His body language closed up and he said, “It didn’t feel very good.” So I said, “You have to trust me. How did it make you feel?” He said, “It made me feel like nothing that I would do in life would ever matter.” I said: “You didn’t hit the streets when you were fourteen. You hit the streets when you were nine.” And we both started crying.

  That was about the most incredible story I had ever heard, so I immediately told it to my wife, Felicia. This may have been a mistake. My wife is both the biggest Oprah fan in the world and literally Miss Congeniality (she won that award in the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Contest). A week later she told me, “I reached out to Shaka on Facebook and we’re now Facebook friends.” I replied, “Did you hear the whole story? He just spent nineteen years in prison for a murder he did commit. That’s not a guy that you just friend on Facebook!” She said, “Well, he’s going to be in town, so I invited him out to dinner.” Uh-oh.

  I made a reservation at John Bentley’s, two blocks from my house. If anything went wrong, I figured we could make a fast getaway. Instead, after a three-hour dinner, I invited Shaka back to our house, where we talked for another five hours.

  He was maybe the most insightful person I had ever spoken to about how to build a culture and run an organization. He had been the CEO of a prison gang, a tough organization to manage. (His group and rival prison organizations did not self-identify as gangs, but as religious organizations. I will refer to them as squads.) And he not only built a strong culture—he then changed his squad into something entirely different. He displayed all the skills this book hopes to impart: he shaped a culture, recognized its flaws, then transformed it into something better.

  Another factor that made me want to write about Senghor is that people who end up in prison generally come from broken cultures. Their parents abandoned or beat them. Their friends sold them out. And they can’t rely on a common understanding of basic ideas like keeping your word. Prison provides culture’s hardest test case; to build culture there, you have to start from the very beginning, from first principles.

  Cultural Orientation

  James White (Senghor’s birth name) went to prison at an age when most of us went to college. College culture introduced most of us to frat parties; prison culture introduced White to extreme violence and intimidation. As he told me, when he went to prison he believed it would be his home from then on.

  Going into prison at nineteen and knowing that I was about to serve this long sentence, I couldn’t see two decades out. I felt this was forever. The only thing that was guaranteed was the end of my sentence, forty years off. The idea of getting out at sixty was ridiculous.

  First came county jail. A couple of things were happening when you arrived. One, guys were trying to identify if they had a beef with you from the streets. Two, they were trying to figure out if you could be exploited. Every tier had a Rock Boss or a crew that ran the tier. Outside your cell you walked into a little area called the Day Room, which had toilets, showers, and some community tables. Rock Bosses sat on the tables like lions looking for prey. A Rock Boss would be more chill than his second in command and his guys; if he was a lion, his guys were the hyenas.

  One Rock Boss asked me, “Where are you from?” It was more of a diagnostic than a question. When I replied “Brightmo”—the ’hood pronunciation of Brightmoor, a neighborhood in Detroit—I gained credibility. Had I been from the suburbs, it would have indicated vulnerability. The next question was, “What you in here for?” I replied “Murder.” Murder was a much more prestigious crime than, say, a sex offense, which would have made me a target.

  So I was safe for the moment, but I could see everything going forward would be a test. If people were playing basketball and you said, “I got next,” and then somebody else said they got next, you had to decide if you would let a motherfucker take your next or not. If not, you had to be willing to stand up for yourself and fight.

  It’s one integrated system from the streets to the jail to the prison. Your personal brand follows you. Do people know you from the streets as someone that’s got respect? Do you have dirt on your name for snitching? There was this whole predatory energy. If family put money on your books you can be robbed. You might be vulnerable sexually.

  It’s literally all in the first day that this is what it is. They called it the gladiator school, because it’s where you established your rank.

  After he transferred to state prison, White faced an even more intense version of orientation.

  The new men were kept in quarantine for two weeks to make sure we didn’t have any diseases or other issues that would keep us out of the general population. The day we got out, we saw a guy get stabbed in the neck. People get stabbed in areas of the prison where there are no officers—on the back staircase; in the recreation center where one officer watches three hundred men; in the corridor to the chow hall or to the law library. So we’re in the recreation center and this guy gets stabbed and the guy stabbing him does it so calmly and casually, discards the knife, and goes to the chow hall.

  Guys were visibly shaken, like, “Where the fuck are we at?” I remember thinking, So this is the extreme end of what happens in prison. And then asking myself, If you get into a conflict with somebody, could you stab them and just keep it moving? I had never stabbed anybody. I had shot someone, but that was a reaction to a conflict on the streets. It was very different from premeditating, “Okay, I am going to stab this person. Where am I going to stab this person at? Do I want to scare him, wound him, get him to leave the yard I’m on, or kill him?” In prison you stab with many different intentions.

  It takes callousness to do that, and I didn’t have that yet. So I had to ask myself, If this is about survival, can you make that call? You don’t know who the fuck you are in prison until you face something that makes you fearful or courageous. Some of the guys I thought were tough guys were really affected by the stabbing, but I realized that I wasn’t. I was never an initiator of conflict, but I did grow up fighting and I was really good at it. If we were fighting I was like, “Let’s get to it.�
� I knew that if this was the worst, then I could make that decision and survive.

  One violent object lesson, a moment of profound introspection, and White was fully oriented into Michigan’s prison culture. He knew that to succeed there, he had to change—and he did.

  White’s Rise

  White’s prison was run by five gangs: the Sunni Muslims, the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Five Percenters, and the Melanic Islamic Palace of the Rising Sun, known as the Melanics. The squads controlled commerce and provided their members with protection and amenities like drugs, cigarettes, and better food supplied by their friends in the kitchen, such as chicken or fresh ground beef. A new man who didn’t join a gang was vulnerable.

  White joined the Melanics, a squad that had originated in prison and taught idiosyncratic principles derived from the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, including self-determination and using education as a force for black uplift. The Melanics stood in contrast to the Nation of Islam, a chapter of the national organization, and the Sunni Muslims, who followed the Koran. (Unlike states such as California, where street gangs had chapters that ran prisons, most of the squads in the Michigan system were nominally organized around a form of worship.) The Melanics were relatively small, numbering about two hundred members, but they had a reputation for recruiting tough guys and running a tight ship. Yet White soon discovered that the gang wasn’t living up to its code: