What You Do Is Who You Are
How to Create Your Business Culture
Ratings21
Average rating3.9
Much like Ben's other book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, this book is 1/2 story telling and 1/2 advice on running a company.
What's different is the story telling 1/2 in What You Do Is Who You Are focuses on leaders outside of the business realm. This includes deep dives into how Toussaint Louverture, Shaka Senghor and Genghis Khan built cultures with their actions. These sections felt like dragged out history lessons with tenuous connections to the purpose of the book. I struggled for useful take-aways. However... they were interesting, and I appreciate Ben including some different perspectives than you'd usually find in a book about building a business culture.
Be prepared: the structure of this book is messy. It bounces around exploring cultures with no real order. It'd alternate between a chapter or two that didn't connect with me, then a chapter or two that connected strongly.
Where it really shined was the 1/2 of the book telling stories and describing cultural challenges at modern companies: Netflix, Google, Uber, etc. Ben has tremendous insight here and highlights great examples.
This would be a phenomenal book to read while creating cultural principals for a company—it's very geared towards that. I really enjoyed the examples of using principles to counter-balance other principles in order to create a punchy but balanced set.
2 stars to the history lesson part of the book, 4 stars to the practical advice on startup culture.
The title of the book is an apt summary of the lessons presented. Horowitz uses non-conventional leadership case studies to bring home that your actions define your culture, not the corporate values in a document that lives somewhere in the cloud. Recommended read for founders/executives.
To use Genghis Khan as an example of inclusion and tolerance is a sad joke even depressed standup comedians can't pull off. Most of the narrative and anecdotes in this book have a strong white privileged pov vibe that I couldn't shake off.
Turns out being in VC business really affects the brain, in a bad narrow minded way.