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

Horowitz's second book is about culture — but told through unusual case studies: Toussaint Louverture's slave revolution in Haiti, the samurai bushido code, Shaka Senghor's prison gang, and Genghis Khan's meritocratic army. The argument is that culture is not what you say or what you believe but what you do repeatedly, and that programming it requires the same kind of specific, deliberate action as programming software. For product direction the most useful idea is the framing of culture as a code with bugs — misbehaviour in an organisation is usually a cultural bug, not a people problem, and debugging it requires looking at the system rather than at the individual. Read alongside McCord's Powerful and Benedict's Patterns of Culture for complementary approaches to the same question. Horowitz writes with the same honesty as in The Hard Thing; the historical examples are its distinctive feature.