Slavery, Prison & Business Culture
Business culture. A buzz word that has come to stay, as everyone is concerned with building the right one. But where is culture? In the story of a slave and a prisoner.
Apple doesn’t fight to save a few million if that means a more appealing headquarter. Amazon offers employees the crappiest desks available. Actually, the first desks on Amazon were made with doors, with legs attached to them. Just by examining these decisions, it’s possible to extrapolate bits of the culture engrained on two different billion-dollar companies, each with its differences. But culture is not a Starbucks recent phenomenon.
In the book What you do is Who you are, Ben Horowitz, a venture capitalist, highlights historical events where culture played a big role in shaping the outcome, from an 18th-century slave to a recent prisoner.
The story of Toussaint Louverture illustrates clearly the power of culture. Toussaint was a slave born in Haiti, who eradicated slavery after becoming the governor. How did he do it? He built a culture that challenged his soldiers to use established values to make decisions: they could not have concubines, had to dress well, and pillage was forbidden. These were a few rules that empowered his army to make ethics explicit and gave them the power to fight the enemies.
“Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. ”
Shaka Senghor was arrested for murder at 19 years old. There he became the leader of the Melanics, a prison gang. He completely changed the culture of it, his life, and other prisoners’ life. He persuaded his team to work out, study and eat together — he wanted to promote the rise of a strong group that was there to protect each other. Alongside this, he was slowly introducing a moral code that reshaped the culture from violence to ethics. An important aspect that Shaka reinforces is the need for the leader to follow the code, otherwise, where lies the responsibility?
The author, Ben, tells the story of when he was rewriting the accounts to make them more promising. Although it wasn’t illegal, an advisor alerted him for the concept of trust that was embedded in the company’s values. He chose not to do it after all.
Each action performed reinforces the culture or ruins it. Creating a strong culture is then, an every-day decision, rather a one-time statement.
“There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.”