Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in a company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do.

Culture is an abstract set of principles that lives — or dies — by concrete decisions the people in your organization make.

The Culture is Remembered

… your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there.

If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will be accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.

While a good culture doesn’t guarantee success, it will be the aspect of the company that employees remember forever. Ben says that employees quickly forget press releases, quarterly reviews, product definitions, but people never forget what it was like to work somewhere.

Related to what is remembered, Ben quotes the samurai Hagakure, “the way of the warrior is to be found dying”. It is at this time that you no longer have the chance to do the honorable things that you wish you would have done. Therefore, every day in life, meditate on this time of death and how you want to be remembered. This goes for companies too. How do you want your company to be remembered?

Companies — just like gangs, armies and nations — are large organizations that rise or fall because of the daily micro-behaviors of the human beings that compose them.

The behavior of the people in an organizations is often due to the culture, not the people themselves. If you ever find yourself questioning peoples’ behaviors, stop and instead question the culture that encouraged or allowed this behavior. Additionally, Ben talked about how the culture of a company can shift the behavior of an individual, even when outside of the workplace. The recommendation was that if your place of work doesn’t have a culture that you personally believe in or that you disagree with, leave as quickly as possible.

Culture isn’t a set of magical rules that make everyone behave the way you’d like. It’s a system of behaviors that you hope most people will follow most of the time… [the] aim is to be better, not perfect.

Culture is Defined by Actions and Inactions

A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody.

Values are aspirations, while virtues are actions. The samurai bushido code referred to their core principles or code of action as “virtues” rather than “values”.

[culture] is a consequence of actions rather than beliefs.

Furthermore, culture is just as much defined by the inactions as it is by the actions or virtues. Ben mentions, that in the military, if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve just set the new standard.

Ben tells a story of Shaka Senghor, who was in prison for murder. When he first arrived in prison he was in a position where the other prisoners were trying to “figure him out”. The other prisoners were just as much interested in his inactions as they were his actions. For example, could someone bully him without repercussions? Similarly, new employees at a company are trying to figure out what they should and shouldn’t do. Should they leave early? Should they call someone out when they do something unethical? If something is broken, should they say something?

Additionally, values and/or virtues need to be explicitly defined. Phrases like “do the right thing.” are ambiguous and mean something different to everyone, especially when the company is comprised of people from diverse backgrounds. Does doing the right thing mean that it is acceptable to miss quarterly projections because your were acting ethically?

Culture is a Long-term Investment

Ben describe certain characteristics such as integrity, honesty and decency as “long-term culture investments”. I liked this phrasing for two reasons. First, recognizing that culture is not something that you can “solve” or “finish” in any amount of time. Rather, it is something that you are always optimizing for tomorrow or next month or year or decade. However, a wrong culture decision can quickly and harshly undo a lot of that long-term work. Second, seeing culture as an investment. Often with investments, you are more interested in the future rewards over the near-term gains. From personal experience, it is so much easier for a company to optimize for the short-term with measured goals than it is to consider the long-term harm to the culture. It’s also difficult to advocate for the health of the long-term culture over a win in the short-term. The seemingly harmless, little things in the moment compound and ruin culture.

What you measure is what you value.

Relatedly, Ben says that cultures must evolve along with the mission of the company. He gave the example of Facebook’s culture evolving from “move fast and break things” when they were trying to keep up and pass MySpace to “move fast with stable infrastructure” after passing MySpace and trying to establish partnerships.

Cultural Bounds

Like with many things, there need to be bounds. In a culture of competitiveness, it is important that employees are aware of the cultural and ethical bounds and that they recognize these bounds take precedence over the culture.

Evaluating Culture

When people orient themselves in a new place, they pick up the habits of the “successful” people around them. Whether those habits align with the culture or not. Ben talks about how observing newcomers is often the best way to understand your culture.

…who you hire determines your culture more than anything else.

…a gigantic portion of your culture success will be determined by what gets rewarded at your company.

Conversely to the point above, Ben says the following:

Every time an employee works hard to make a change or to propose a new idea, only to be met with bureaucracy, indecision, or apathy, the culture suffers.

Changing Culture

Words don’t change culture. Changing culture requires impactful events. Ben gave the example of Reed Hastings kicking the DVD executives out of the weekly executive meetings at Netflix.

Ben tells a related story about changing the culture at Netscape around agreeing to disagree and commit. He says that there were three rules:

  1. 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.
  2. Don’t go back and play with dead snakes. Too many people waste too much time on decisions that have already been made.
  3. All opportunities start out looking like snakes.

Defining Rules

Ben lists four points creating rules.

  1. A rule must be memorable.
  2. A rule must raise the question, “Why?”.
  3. The cultural impact must be clear.
  4. Everyone must encounter the rule daily.

Ben says that it is the “Why?” that gets remembered. The “what” is just another bullet in the list.

Leading Culture

Step one in designing a successful culture is to be yourself

As a leader, it is even more important that you embody and strongly believe in the company values and practice the virtues. But the problem is that most people, including leaders, don’t possess a “supersharp” definition of their personal values. Ben poses the question, “How do you become the kind of leader that you yourself want to follow?”

A hypocrite at the highest level quickly destroys culture.

Diversity of Talent

If you only hire talented people from one race or gender, then you probably do not understand talent.

People understand their own strengths, value them highly, and know how to test for them in an interview

People who come from different backgrounds and culture bring different skills, different communication styles, and different mores to the organization

A Foundation of Trust

Trust…is the foundation of communication

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

As an organization grows, communication becomes one of, if not the, most difficult challenge. If communication can be offset by more trust, then the efficiency of a smaller organization will remain, rather than decline, as the organization grows.