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

it out loud. Through our culture we built our business to a place where people respected it due to the culture itself.

      How you dress, the most visible thing you do, can be the most important invisible force driving your organization’s behavior. Ovitz sums it up: “Cultures are shaped more by the invisible than the visible. They are willed.”

      INCORPORATE OUTSIDE LEADERSHIP—HEY, MOTHERFUCKER!

      When I was CEO of LoudCloud, I had to shift the company from a high-flying cloud services company into a grind-’em-out enterprise software company so we could survive. After the dot-com and telecom crashes of the early 2000s, the market for cloud services had gone from nearly infinite to nearly zero overnight. After we squeaked through the transition as a new company called Opsware, we found ourselves getting killed in the software market by a competitor named BladeLogic. I knew that to compete with them we needed a major cultural change.

      At LoudCloud, we began with unlimited demand and built a culture oriented around fulfilling it. So we were focused on empowerment, removing bottlenecks to growth, and being a great place to work. To succeed as an enterprise software company, selling our platform to big businesses, we would have to become a culture distinguished by urgency, competitiveness, and precision. I needed to bring in a leader with those attributes.

      The person I hired as our head of sales, Mark Cranney, was not a cultural fit with the rest of us. In fact, he was a complete cultural misfit. Our employees were mostly irreligious Democrats from the west coast who dressed casually and who were cordial and easygoing. We assumed that everyone had the best intentions. Cranney was a Mormon Republican from Boston who wore a suit and tie, was deeply suspicious of everyone, and was one of the most competitive people on earth. But over the next four years he not only saved the company, but got us to an outcome nobody would have believed.

      I knew why I hired Mark: when I interviewed him, I could tell he had the urgency, the know-how, and the discipline we needed. But I did not understand why he took the job. He knew we were losing and, given our granola-eating demographics, that we were probably losers. So what made him take the risk? I recently asked him, and his reason surprised me:

       I had risen as far as I could at an east-coast-based company called PTC; they had nepotistic politics at the top level. I must have looked at forty sales jobs in Boston and there was nothing good.

       The Opsware recruiter called several times and I finally called him back and said, “I’m not going to California. In California the real estate sucks, the culture sucks, and they don’t appreciate the sales side. Plus, isn’t that the company the BladeLogic guys call Oopsware? What do you think, I’m fuckin’ stupid?”

       He keeps calling and finally, I say “Fine, I’ll go meet Marc and Ben, but that’s it.” [Marc Andreessen was the company’s cofounder.] Then I look at my BlackBerry when I land in San Francisco and I see there’s a whole fucking crew I have to interview with.