What You Do Is Who You Are

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.