requiring officers to respect their marital vows must have seemed absurd. One can almost hear the officers saying, “You must be kidding!” Certainly they would have demanded the rationale for this edict.
When everyone wants to know “Why?” in an organization, the answer programs the culture, because it’s an answer everyone will remember. The explanation will be repeated to every new recruit and will embed itself into the cultural fabric. New officers would ask, “Tell me again why I can’t have a concubine?” And be told: “Because in this army, nothing is more important than your word. If we can’t trust you to keep your word to your wife, we definitely can’t trust you to keep your word to us.” (The matter is complicated by the fact that Louverture had illegitimate children, but no leader is perfect.)
Marriage, honesty, and loyalty were symbols of the society that Louverture aspired to lead—and he programmed them all into his culture with one simple shocking rule.
Dress for Success
When Toussaint Louverture joined the rebel army, most of its soldiers didn’t wear clothes. They had joined up straight from the fields, and were accustomed to working naked. To help transform this ragtag group into an army—to give them a sense that they were an elite fighting force—Louverture and his corevolutionaries dressed in the most elaborate military uniforms attainable. It was a constant reminder of who they were and what they might achieve.
Philippe Girard writes:
Eager to show that they were more than a pillaging mob, the rebels took on all the trappings of a European army of the Old Regime, complete with aides-de-camp, laissez-passers, and fancy officer brevets.
To many of Toussaint’s biographers, this behavior seemed clownish and absurd. Weren’t the rebels trying to destroy the Europeans and all that they stood for? Definitely not. The rebels were trying to build an army that could set them free and a culture that could sustain their independence. So they adopted the best practices from armies that had succeeded before them. As we will see in the next chapter, something as seemingly simple as a dress code can change behavior, and therefore culture, not only in war but in business.
Incorporate Outside Leadership
A leader can transform a culture by bringing in leadership from a culture whose ways she wants to adapt. Julius Caesar did this to great effect when he built the Roman Empire. Rather than executing vanquished leaders, he often left them in place so that they could govern the region using their superior understanding of the local culture. Louverture probably absorbed this idea when he read Caesar’s Commentaries.
Unlike Caesar, Louverture faced a situation where the oppressors and the oppressed were accustomed to pigeonholing each other by skin color. Nonetheless, he brought mulattoes into his army and incorporated deserting French royalist officers, whom he used to organize an efficient staff and train his army in the orthodox military arts. This wasn’t easy—there was consternation when he showed up with white men in tow—but he insisted. When blacks told him they wouldn’t obey whites or mulattoes, he would pour a glass of wine and a glass of water, then mix them together and say, “How can you tell which is which? We must all live together.”
Company cultures organize around a simple goal: build a product or service that people want. But when those companies progress beyond their initial battles they must evolve to take on new challenges. To defeat the French, Louverture needed to understand and master that culture and its military tactics, so he brought in leaders with that knowledge.
I often see companies that plan to go into new areas, but don’t want to shift their culture accordingly. Many consumer companies want to penetrate the enterprise market—that is, selling to big companies—but resist having employees who walk around in fancy suits. They believe that their original culture should suffice. But their results prove otherwise.
Building a great culture means adapting it to circumstances. And that often means bringing in outside leadership from the culture you need to penetrate or master.
Make Decisions That Demonstrate Cultural Priorities
The more counterintuitive the leader’s decision, the stronger the impact on the culture. Louverture set his culture by making one of the most counterintuitive decisions of the revolution.
Once the rebels won control of the island, many of Louverture’s soldiers wanted revenge on the plantation owners. It would have been the course of least resistance for Louverture to order the owners shot out of hand. They would certainly have done the same to him. But he abhorred the spirit of revenge, believing it would destroy rather than elevate the culture.
He also had to fund his war against France. If his country went bankrupt, his revolution would fail. Crops were the entire economy of Saint-Domingue: without them, it could never be an important nation. As Louverture declared, “The guarantee of the liberty of the blacks is the prosperity of agriculture.” He knew that plantations had to remain large to be economically viable, and that the owners had the knowledge, education, and experience the colony needed to keep the plantations going.
So Louverture not only let the plantation owners live, he let them keep their land. But he insisted that they pay their laborers one-fourth of the profits. And he ordered them to live on their plantations, so they would be directly accountable for paying their workers and treating them well. If they disobeyed, their land was confiscated.
With these decisions, Louverture established what a thousand speeches could not have: that the revolution wasn’t about revenge and that the economic well-being of the colony was its highest priority. It was all very well for him to say “no reprisals,” but it was what he did that set the culture.
Walk the Talk
No culture can flourish without the enthusiastic participation of its leader. No matter how well designed, carefully programmed, and insistently enforced your cultural elements are, inconsistent or hypocritical behavior by the person in charge will blow the whole thing up.
Imagine a CEO who decides that punctuality is critical to her company’s culture. She delivers eloquent speeches about how being on time is a matter of respect. She points out that employee time is the company’s most valuable asset, so that when you show up late, you are effectively robbing your colleagues. But she then shows up late to all her meetings. How many employees will adhere to that value?
Louverture understood this perfectly. He asked a great deal from his soldiers, but he was more than willing to embody his own standards. He lived with the men in his army and shared their labors. If a cannon had to be moved, he pitched in, once getting a hand badly crushed in the process. He charged at his troops’ head, something Europe had rarely seen from a leader since Alexander the Great, and was wounded seventeen times.
Louverture began building trust by being trustworthy himself. As C. L. R. James observed, “By his incessant activity on their behalf he gained their confidence, and among a people ignorant, starving, badgered, and nervous, Louverture’s word by 1796 was law—the only person in the North whom they could be depended upon to obey.”
Because the culture he wanted was a straight reflection of his own values, Louverture walked the talk better than most. His commandment against revenge was put to the test after he defeated his rival André Rigaud, a mulatto commander in the South, in the bloody War of Knives. Rigaud had not only rebelled against Louverture, but he had scoffed at the basis of his authority, proclaiming that the caste system, which put
