A video of the 30 minute talk can be found at the bottom of this post.

Culture is the collective behavior of everyone within an organization. It is how the members of a body behave and conduct themselves when they are left to their own devices.

Personal questions of business culture:

– Do you reply to emails on time?

– Are you open to new ideas?

– Does job title impact who is right or wrong?

– Do you show up on time?

– Is it ok to take risks?

– Do you use your own products?

– Do you tell the truth?

Do the members of your team do the same?

There has only ever been one successful slave revolution. Only one.

Haiti, 1791, lead by Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Slavery is not conducive to a great culture. Your life is worth very little, you own nothing and you cannot invest in your future. The result is little trust, short-term planning, general ignorance and low loyalty.

Almost all failed slave revolts in Haiti and elsewhere demonstrated this. Most revolts were self-orientated, back-stabbing or short sighted.

How did Toussaint L’Ouverture separate slavery from the culture of slavery and lead the only successful slave revolution ever? How do you create a culture that works for you and your business?

1. Keep what works.

When L’Ouverture started the revolution, he harnessed one of the strengths of Haitian slave culture; music.

He used music made on the sidelines to send out instructions over vast distances. Music gave him long range, real-time communication. The French, Spanish and British on the other hand relied on runners, notes and other slow or local communication networks.

Modern Example: When Steve Jobs rejoined Apple he kept the focus on integrated hardware and software products. Instead of going less vertical by focusing on either the hardware or the software like the rest of the market, he went more vertical. Under Jobs, Apple ventured into music players, phones, online stores. He continued what Apple was good at and what their culture supported: the end-to-end user experience.

2. Create shocking rules.

In the time of rape and pillage, Toussaint created the rule that officers were not allowed to cheat on their wives.

One of the big problems of slave culture is that there is no loyalty. The introduction of this rule ensured that officers kept their promise to their wives. This in turn helped create a new culture of faithfulness, loyalty and the keeping of your word.

Modern Example: Facebook has the rule “Move fast and break things”. This now-mantra goes against the usual engineer mentality of move cautiously and fix things.

“Move fast and break things” reinforces a culture of innovation and speed.

3. Incorporate people from other cultures and adopt their way of doing things.

When L’Ouverture defeated the British he incorporated some of the British officers into his army. This allowed his army to learn, evolve and gain from the new cultures and tactics they were being exposed to.

L’Ouverture adopted this approach from the lessons he learned from reading the history of Julius Caesar, who is known for incorporated defeated enemies within his ranks. (Genghis Khan did the same)

Modern Example: Google launched Google Apps (G Suite) many years before Microsoft launched Office 365, but Microsoft still won. How? There was no enterprise culture in google. Steve Ballmer would go to prospective clients and say: “are you going to buy from me or from Google? Is Larry Page going to visit you?”. Larry never did.

Instead of bringing in outside people exposed to enterprise cultures, Google appointed Diane Greene who was on the Alphabet board to run the enterprise solutions. This did not successfully create an enterprise culture.

4. Make decisions that demonstrate priorities.

What would you have done with the old slave masters? Toussaint realized that he needed them for the economy. So instead of killing or exiling the plantation owners he kept them in place, but forced them to start paying and treating their labour well. The new cost of production (slaves to workers) was made affordable by lowering state taxes.

The result of keeping the ex-slave owners in place was a booming economy. Under Toussaint Haiti had more export income than the USA.

Modern Example: One day Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, banned the team behind DVD deliveries from executive staff meetings. This was at the time when income from DVD rentals contributed 100% of Netflix’s revenue.

This decision demonstrated that Netflix wanted to become #1 in streaming. It worked!

https://a16z.com/2017/03/04/culture-and-revolution-ben-horowitz-toussaint-louverture/