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Defining Your Culture

Do you want to be like Apple and spend $5 billion on a state-of-the-art corporate headquarters to underline your commitment to cutting edge design and environmental awareness, or do you want to be like Wal-Mart and furnish your headquarters with sample furniture submitted by manufacturers seeking to sell their wares in your stores?

To explain the challenges in making such choices, Horowitz avoids the standard practice of interviewing current successful executives, choosing instead to identify four historical figures to support his proposal: Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture who led the only successful slave revolt in history; Japanese Samurai and their focus on virtues (what you do) over values (what you believe); Genghis Khan’s ability to create “an innovative and inclusive meritocracy,”; and Shaka Senghor, the powerful gang leader in the 1990’s Michigan prison system.

The author makes a deliberate choice to avoid survivorship bias––the incorrect assumption that successful companies owe their success to their unique cultures. By exploring historical events rather than reverse-engineering existing companies, Horowitz is able to emphasize that how each figure saw their respective culture was as important as the decisions made to strengthen it, often in the face of overwhelming odds. Louverture succeeded in reprogramming a culture of an entire nation; Khan was imprisoned by his own tribe as a youth and yet managed to earn the right to lead and transform them; Senghor transformed a disparate crew of outcasts into a cohesive team; and the Samurai built a warrior class that ruled Japan for seven centuries.

Once these stories are fully developed, the author then draws parallels with modern business leaders whose success is shown to mirror the decisions made by those historical figures. The first African American CEO of McDonald’s, Don Thompson, for example, pursued the same objective of cultural inclusiveness as Genghis Khan. Reed Hastings at Netflix and Travis Kalanick at Uber applied the same cultural techniques as Louverture. The clear connections show both the value of reading history, and the merit of enough humility to realize that much of what you need for successful leadership can be found there.
What You Do Is Who You Are offers a creative exploration of historical figures set against modern business leaders to underscore the importance of paying attention to your organizational culture.