What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

As an entrepreneur, I had trained myself to think in contrarian ways. The secret to finding a breakthrough idea, as Peter Thiel says, is that you have to believe something that nobody else does.

They all told me, “Pay attention to your culture. Culture is the most important thing.”

Blood of a slave, heart of a king. —Nas

Louverture used seven key tactics, which I examine below, to transform slave culture into one respected around the world. You can use them to change any organization’s culture.

He said that when he was recruiting he looked for people who were smart, humble, hardworking, and collaborative.

Louverture’s new state would be based on personal industry, social morality, public education, religious toleration, free trade, civic pride, and racial equality. He emphasized that attaining these goals would be each person’s responsibility: “Learn, citizens, to appreciate the glory of your new political status. In acquiring the rights that the co

Sad story, but how could it happen? How could Louverture, genius of culture and human nature that he was, not perceive the brewing treachery? In a sense, he was like the Greek hero Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx but who couldn’t clearly see those closest to him. Louverture’s optimistic view of human

Louverture gradually came to a realization that no one else in colonial Saint-Domingue had arrived at: culture, not color, determined behavior.

Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.