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What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture Kindle Edition
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Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times bestselling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times.
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 thirty 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 seven hundred 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 book aims to help you do the things you need to become the kind of leader you want to be—and others want to follow.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Business
- Publication dateOctober 29, 2019
- File size2916 KB
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About the Author
Ben Horowitz is the cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs building the next generation of leading technology companies. The firm's investments include Airbnb, GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Previously he was cofounder and CEO of Opsware, formerly Loudcloud, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Horowitz writes about his experiences and insights from his career as a computer science student, software engineer, cofounder, CEO, and investor in a blog that is read by nearly ten million people. He has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Fortune, the Economist, and Bloomberg Businessweek, among others. Horowitz lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Felicia.
Product details
- ASIN : B07NVN4QCM
- Publisher : Harper Business (October 29, 2019)
- Publication date : October 29, 2019
- Language : English
- File size : 2916 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 289 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #226,153 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #43 in Workplace Behavior
- #83 in Business Teams
- #260 in Business Leadership
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Ben Horowitz is the cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs building the next generation of leading technology companies. The firm's investments include Airbnb, GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Previously, he was cofounder and CEO of Opsware, formerly Loudcloud, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Horowitz writes about his experiences and insights from his career as a computer science student, software engineer, cofounder, CEO, and investor in a blog that is read by nearly 10 million people. He has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Fortune, the Economist, and Bloomberg Businessweek, among others. Horowitz lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Felicia.
Follow him on Twitter @bhorowitz and his blog, www.bhorowitz.com.
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Customers find the book insightful and brilliantly practical. They also say it's well-articulated and a great read.
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Customers find the book insightful, with awesome ideas worth sharing. They say it has some good qualifications on culture, practical advice on real-world dilemmas, and a history lesson. Readers also appreciate the inspirational stories and truths about themselves. They mention the book has a variety of examples regarding how cultures are made.
"...It is refreshing to read non-conventional stories to illustrate culture, and I suspect the stories will also stand the test of time better..." Read more
"...A solid business read for its unique perspective, historical lessons and practical counsel. Check it out." Read more
"The book is full of practical advice on real-world dilemmas for build a fit-for-purpose company culture...." Read more
"I read this, and think this is one of the most important books for managers and leaders (aspiring and future) to read, together with Grove's "High..." Read more
Customers find the book well-articulated, riveting, and brilliant. They also say the topic is tough but presented well.
"...The result is a riveting read and a brilliant guidebook. I finished the book in a week and I've already recommended it to two of my colleagues." Read more
"I really enjoyed reading this book. It's easy to read and interesting. Kept my attention...." Read more
"Ben Horowitz writing style, honestly raw attitude, and carefully considered choice of topics and examples makes the book very pleasant to read...." Read more
"Great book, great author, well articulated and it things, that be addressed immediately, the flow of the book is exceptional!" Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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It is sometimes dangerous to retrospectively fit a story to the past to make it seem plausible. Narrative fallacy is the technical term for it. Ben does use stories to illustrates principles, and whether it is accurate or not is not really the point. It is refreshing to read non-conventional stories to illustrate culture, and I suspect the stories will also stand the test of time better (unlike Good to Great, where the examples used were undone by the companies themselves post the book).
Finally, I loved the (sometimes profane) rap lyrics at the start of every chapter. I could not always understand what the relevance was, but that does not really matter.
The basic premise is that actions are louder than words. The real life and often personal examples Horowitz uses bear out this premise. What makes the book unique and thus compelling is the use of not typical corporate culture re-hashes. There are a few Apple and Amazon examples, but much of the book reflects on leading culture accomplishments such as the Haitian revolution, a prison gang, Genghis Khan and the Samurai code.
A solid business read for its unique perspective, historical lessons and practical counsel. Check it out.
But I would say that this book trumps the others, because a culture is what makes an organization tick even if the leaders are not there. As leaders are the stewards and gardeners of the organization culture, this makes this book even more important than the others above.
Lots of good stuff, just have to mine it out from all the filler
Actual scenarios the author experienced were far more interesting then the historical context.
I also found it odd that the emulated cultures were all quite violent and bereft of compassion. Even the member of the staff referenced was quite brutal to subordinates.
In his own words, he talked primarily of "wartime [leaders] " . Not the alternative. But that is mostly beside the point. It was just distracting.
Top reviews from other countries
While Hard Thing About Hard Things was good, but nothing exceptional, this book is unique and complets Collins books such as Build to Last and Good to Great. Overall an outstanding work.
For any leaders that doesn’t yet recognise that their behaviours are more than half of the success in their own companies and teams, it is an essential read.
Em What You Do Is Who You Are, Ben demonstra que domina o assunto de Culturas Corporativas como poucos e inclusive ilustra o tema como vários exemplos históricos, o que agregou muito a narrativa.
Ao destrinchar como as maiores empresas do mundo adotaram ou deveriam ter adotado estratégias em cultura corporativa, Horowitz escreveu mais um livro que será uma bíblia para amantes de empreendedorismo e startups.