What You Do Is Who You Are
by Ben Horowitz · first published 2019
70% recommend30% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Explains how company culture is built through leadership actions and shared enforcement, using memorable examples from the author's experience. Readers find it well written, entertaining
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"Keynote Straight talk and advice on building and running a startup from Ben Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most respected voices"--
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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I really liked Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are". However, the only passage that I disliked and stood out to me is when he defended David Drummond for his ability to thrive at Google for a long time despite the corporate culture changing. This was…
on “Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation” ↗Look up the “shocking rule” principle from Horowitz’s “What you do is who you are”. Sometimes you need to take a dramatic action to make it clear what your culture is (or what you want it to be). It’s perhaps unfair to one of those 6 who was hypothetically just being polite and pretending…
on “Surveillance company harassed female employees using its own facial recognition” ↗…organizational learning growing. All together that creates a culture - it’s not the processes themselves, but shared enforcement and encouragement that keeps organizational learning going. Ben Horowitz’a book “What you do is who you are” is good on that as well. Worth a deeper dive :)
on “How Learning Works: Components, Systems, Loops” ↗+1 for all of these. Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are" is also well written and quite entertaining. There's a good mix of personal experience, humour and history.
on “The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read” ↗…Glass - Venkatesh Rao - The Gervais Principle - Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles - Colin Wilson - The Outsider - Stanislaw Lem - Cyberiad - Chaos Monkeys - Antonio Martinez - Ben Horowitz - What You Do Is Who You Are - Alice Flaherty - The Midnight Disease - Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia - Ken Binmore - Rational Decisions - Josh Kaufman - The Personal MBA
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023” ↗…Decisions (Claudio Fernández-Aráoz) - The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (Ozzie Osman) - Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn) Purpose, Passion, and Self - Start with Why (Simon Sinek) - What You Do is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz) - Drive (Daniel Pink) - Mindset (Carol Dweck) - Grit (Angela Duckworth) - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson) Fundraising/VC - Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor) - Venture…
on “Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?” ↗…of these books below really resonate with me: "The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&... "What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture": https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/B07X36GGQ7/ref...
on “Operations for Effective CEOs” ↗Wonder if anyone on here has read Ben Horowitz's latest book on culture "What You Do Is Who You Are"? I skimmed through a bit of it but find the war analogies to be a little over the top so far...
on “The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read” ↗Horowitz talks about this in-depth in “What you do is Who You Are.” There are waypoints in a company’s life that can change their trajectory and when you have the weight of employees, their family and company’s existence on your shoulders, it’s easy to compromise on…
on “Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs” ↗…books recently read on my Kindle: - No Rules Rules - Never Split The Difference - The Manager's Path - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant - Ultralearning - The Hard Thing About Hard Things - What You Do is Who You Are - User Story Mapping - Inspired - The Lean Product Playbook - Competing Against Luck - Domain Driven Design - Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Data-Driven Marketing -…
on “What is expected of a engineering manager?” ↗