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

if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all

Walk the Talk

I always felt that early hip-hop songs like Eric B. & Rakim’s “Follow the Leader” or Run-DMC’s “King of Rock” were about what I was doing as an entrepreneur.

Trust, as I discussed in the Louverture chapter, is the foundation of communication. Simply saying something you feel more or less comfortable terming “the truth” doesn’t build trust. What builds trust is the bona fide truth being heard.

If your leadership caused or contributed to the setbacks that necessitated the layoff, cop to that.

The relevant question is, What must employees do to survive and succeed in your organization? What behaviors get them included in, or excluded from, the power base? What gets them ahead?

First impressions of a culture are difficult to reverse. This is why new-employee orientation is better thought of as new-employee cultural orientation. Cultural orientation is your chance to make clear the culture you want and how you intend to get it. What behaviors will be rewarded? Which ones will be discouraged or severely punished?

There are three keys to assigning meaning:

Meditating on your company’s downfall will enable you to build your culture the right way. Imagine you’ve gone bankrupt. Were you a great place to work? What was it like to do business with you? Did your encounters with people leave them better off or worse off? Did the quality of your products make you proud? Modern companies tend to focus on metr