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

Venture capitalist Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things) delivers a strained, self-conscious guide to building organizational culture. “Creating a culture is more complex than just trying to get your people to behave the way you want them to when no one is looking,” he argues, and takes readers through the process of designing a company culture and imbuing it with the values one wants to espouse as well as the level of performance one expects. All of this would be perfectly adequate and run-of-the-mill advice had Horowitz not chosen to illustrate his ideas about creating and maintaining a cohesive workforce with references to Toussaint Louverture’s slave revolt in Haiti, the Bushido samurai code, Genghis Khan’s empire building, and the rise of Shaka Senghor’s Michigan prison gang. The result is a study in tone-deafness; a white author using Louverture’s rebellion against murderous slave owners to contextualize Amazon’s frugality principle does not land in the place the author seems to believe it will. Readers looking for a testosterone jolt will find it here, as Horowitz lays on the bluster with a trowel in order to frame business as being essentially warlike, but there are plenty of culture books out there that don’t stretch to such bizarre lengths to stand out. (Oct.)