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WHAT YOU DO IS WHO YOU ARE
HOW TO CREATE YOUR BUSINESS CULTURE
Ben Horowitz
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Ben Horowitz 2019
Cover design by Andrew Guinn
Jacket photograph © Beowulf Sheehan
Ben Horowitz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Information on previously published material appears here.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008356118
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008356132
Version: 2019-09-24
This is for all the people serving time who did what they did, but are now doing something positive. I see what you are doing.
I know who you are.
One hundred percent of my portion of the proceeds of this book will go to help people coming out of prison change their culture and remain free, and to the people in Haiti trying to rebuild their society and return to the glory of their past.
CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Introduction: What You Do Is Who You Are
1 Culture and Revolution: The Story of Toussaint Louverture
2 Toussaint Louverture Applied
3 The Way of the Warrior
4 The Warrior of a Different Way: The Story of Shaka Senghor
5 Shaka Senghor Applied
6 Genghis Khan, Master of Inclusion
7 Inclusion in the Modern World
8 Be Yourself, Design Your Culture
9 Edge Cases and Object Lessons
10 Final Thoughts
Author’s Note
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Ben Horowitz
About the Publisher
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
In the secular bible that launched the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro: An Interpretation, the indefatigable black bibliophile Arturo Schomburg argued in his essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past” that for too long “the Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture.” The Puerto Rican–born Schomburg didn’t just write about recovering this subsumed culture in white America; he recentered it by amassing one of history’s greatest collections of manuscripts, art, and rare artifacts, which eventually provided the foundation for one of the crown jewels of the New York Public Library system: Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a fortress of learning and enlightenment located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard in the heart of historic Harlem.
Almost a century later, another visionary in our midst, the Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur Ben Horowitz, has produced a fascinating volume at the intersection of business, leadership, and culture studies that rests on the same intellectual foundation as the mighty Schomburg. There is a lesson within a lesson at play in these pages. Instead of turning out one more book using winning case studies on the importance of fostering a thriving, mutually supportive workplace culture, Horowitz roots his own definition of innovation in the deliberate choices he makes to center the leadership stories of present, past, and long past people of color far outside the C-suite or open floor plans of today’s tech giants. They include Toussaint Louverture, the genius behind the only successful slave rebellion in the history of the western hemisphere, the Haitian Revolution of the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century; the samurai of Japan, whose bushido code elevated virtues above values; Genghis Khan, the ultimate outsider who led one of history’s most dominant armies by absorbing the best and brightest among those he defeated; and, perhaps most moving of all, James White, aka Shaka Senghor, who, on a devastating murder conviction, stepped out of quarantine into the belly of the Michigan prison system to become the leader of a violent squad called the Melanics that, over time, he shepherded toward a culture revolution focused on community uplift after prison.
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