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

This book is a genuinely fascinating read. The way in which Horowitz conveys and explores stories through out history while dissecting them and then linking them to modern day examples and explaining how and why culture shifts occur is truly captivating. He provides a real analysis of the world around us, describes in detail that things won’t be perfect, and states that life is sometimes going to be messy. It provides useful life and business lessons and does a good job of providing an exciting new way to describe a topic that has been written about by everyone and their mother.

This book is not a boring read. Unfortunately, though, the very aspect which makes it captivating, interesting, and exciting is also fundamentally flawed. Horowitz uses many examples from throughout ancient and modern history to provide examples and build narratives about how cultures are developed and changed. While doing this, though, he builds his own interpretations of these historical events. As a result, he builds the narrative of these stories to fit the one he is trying to sell to us. Unfortunately, not everything he says or describes is based in historical realities.

Ben Horowitz has long been fascinated by history, and particularly by how people behave differently than you’d expect. The time and circumstances in which they were raised often shapes them – yet a few leaders have managed to shape their times. In What You Do Is Who You Are, he turns his attention to a question crucial to every organization: how do you create and sustain the culture you want?

To Horowitz, culture is how a company makes decisions. It is the set of assumptions employees use to resolve everyday problems: Should I stay at the Red Roof Inn, or the Four Seasons? Should we discuss the color of this product for five minutes or 30 hours? If culture is not purposeful, it will be an accident or a mistake.

What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building – the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for 700 years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, a man convicted of murder who ran the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture.

Horowitz connects these leadership examples to modern case-studies, including how Louverture’s cultural techniques were applied (or should have been) by Reed Hastings at Netflix, Travis Kalanick at Uber, and Hillary Clinton, and how Genghis Khan’s vision of cultural inclusiveness has parallels in the work of Don Thompson, the first African-American CEO of McDonalds, and of Maggie Wilderotter, the CEO who led Frontier Communications. Horowitz then offers guidance to help any company understand its own strategy and build a successful culture.

What You Do Is Who You Are is a journey through culture, from ancient to modern. Along the way, it answers a question fundamental to any organization: Who are we? How do people talk about us when we’re not around? How do we treat our customers? Are we there for people in a pinch? Can we be trusted?

Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do. This audiobook aims to help you do the things you need to become the kind of leader you want to be – and others want to follow.

For anybody looking to become more engaged with building successful cultures this is worth a read. It provides interesting historical examples while giving you a clear link to how things that happened back then still apply today.