What You Do Is Who You Are. Ben Horowitz
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the embargo. Louverture shrewdly selected a white man as his ambassador to appeal to the sensibilities of the slave-owning country. It worked. In 1799, the U.S. Congress authorized President John Adams to exempt from the trade embargo any French territory that did not interfere with American trade. The law was so transparently intended for Saint-Domingue that it was nicknamed “the Louverture clause.”
Pickering wrote Louverture to let him know that the United States would resume commerce with Saint-Domingue. Philippe Girard characterizes the letter beautifully in his masterpiece, Toussaint Louverture:
He closed with an arresting flourish: “I am with due considerations, Sir, your obedient servant.” To a former slave, the niceties of diplomatic language must have had a peculiar ring: Louverture was not used to hearing prominent white men refer to themselves as his “obedient servant.”
More than sixty-five years before the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in the United States, Congress made special provisions for a black man. They negotiated with him not through the lens of the color of his skin but through the lens of the culture he had created.
Louverture used seven key tactics, which I examine below, to transform slave culture into one respected around the world. You can use them to change any organization’s culture.
Keep What Works
To create his army, Louverture began with five hundred handpicked men who learned the art of war with him as he drilled and trained them assiduously. In this way, he was able to create the new culture with minimal divergence. He knew he had to elevate his fighters’ culture to make the army effective, but he also knew that his slave culture had great strengths and that creating a new civilization out of whole cloth—as Lenin would later try and fail to do—would never succeed. People don’t easily adopt new cultural norms and they simply can’t absorb an entirely new system all at once.
He used two preexisting cultural strengths to great effect. The first was the songs the slaves sang at their midnight celebrations of voodoo. Louverture was a devout Catholic who would later outlaw voodoo—but he was also a pragmatist who used the tools at hand. So he converted this simple, memorable vocal template into an advanced communications technology. The Europeans had no means of long-distance, encrypted communication, but his army did. His soldiers would place themselves in the woods surrounding the enemy, scattered in clumps. They would begin their voodoo songs—which were incomprehensible to the European troops—and when they reached a certain verse, it was the signal to attack in concert.
Second, many of Louverture’s soldiers brought military skills with them. Among his warriors were veterans of wars on the Angola-Congo coast. Louverture applied their guerrilla tactics, particularly their way of choosing to meet the enemy in the woods to envelop them and crush them with sheer numbers. As we will see, he would combine this stratagem with the most advanced European tactics to create a hybrid force unlike any his opponents had faced.
Create Shocking Rules
As a slave, you own nothing, have no way to accumulate wealth, and can have everything, including your life and your family, taken without warning. This usually inspires overwhelmingly short-term thinking, which eradicates trust. If I am to keep my word to you rather than to pursue my short-term interests, I must believe there will be a bigger payoff from the relationship in the future than whatever I can get by betraying you now. If I believe there is no tomorrow, then there can be no trust.
This dynamic becomes problematic in an army, because trust is fundamental to running any large organization. Without trust, communication breaks. Here’s why: In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
If I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions at all, because I know that whatever you are doing is in my best interests. On the other hand, if I don’t trust you in the slightest, then no amount of talking, explaining, or reasoning will have any effect on me, because I will never believe you are telling me the truth and acting in my best interests.
As an organization grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If soldiers fundamentally trust the general, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t.
To instill trust throughout his army, Louverture established a rule so shocking it begged the question “Why do we have that rule?” The rule forbade married officers from having concubines. As raping and pillaging were the norm for soldiers, requiring officers to respect their marital vows must have seemed absurd. One can almost hear the officers saying, “You must be kidding!” Certainly they would have demanded the rationale for this edict.
When everyone wants to know “Why?” in an organization, the answer programs the culture, because it’s an answer everyone will remember. The explanation will be repeated to every new recruit and will embed itself into the cultural fabric. New officers would ask, “Tell me again why I can’t have a concubine?” And be told: “Because in this army, nothing is more important than your word. If we can’t trust you to keep your word to your wife, we definitely can’t trust you to keep your word to us.” (The matter is complicated by the fact that Louverture had illegitimate children, but no leader is perfect.)
Marriage, honesty, and loyalty were symbols of the society that Louverture aspired to lead—and he programmed them all into his culture with one simple shocking rule.
Dress for Success
When Toussaint Louverture joined the rebel army, most of its soldiers didn’t wear clothes. They had joined up straight from the fields, and were accustomed to working naked. To help transform this ragtag group into an army—to give them a sense that they were an elite fighting force—Louverture and his corevolutionaries dressed in the most elaborate military uniforms attainable. It was a constant reminder of who they were and what they might achieve.
Philippe Girard writes:
Eager to show that they were more than a pillaging mob, the rebels took on all the trappings of a European army of the Old Regime, complete with aides-de-camp, laissez-passers, and fancy officer brevets.
To many of Toussaint’s biographers, this behavior seemed clownish and absurd. Weren’t the rebels trying to destroy the Europeans and all that they stood for? Definitely not. The rebels were trying to build an army that could set them free and a culture that could sustain their independence. So they adopted the best practices from armies that had succeeded before them. As we will see in the next chapter, something as seemingly simple as a dress code can change behavior, and therefore culture, not only in war but in business.
Incorporate Outside Leadership
A leader can transform a culture by bringing in leadership from a culture whose ways she wants to adapt. Julius Caesar did this to great effect when he built the Roman Empire. Rather than executing vanquished leaders, he often left them in place so that they could govern the region using their superior understanding of the local culture. Louverture probably absorbed this idea when he read Caesar’s Commentaries.
Unlike Caesar, Louverture faced a situation where the oppressors and the oppressed were accustomed to pigeonholing each other by skin color. Nonetheless, he brought mulattoes into his army and incorporated deserting French royalist officers, whom he used to organize an efficient staff and train his army in the orthodox military arts. This wasn’t easy—there was consternation when he showed up with white men in tow—but he insisted. When blacks told him they wouldn’t obey whites or mulattoes, he would pour a glass of wine and a glass of water, then mix them together and say, “How can you tell which is which? We must all live together.”
Company cultures organize around a simple goal: build a product or service that people want. But when those companies progress beyond their initial battles they must evolve to take on new challenges. To defeat the French, Louverture needed to understand and master that culture and its military tactics, so he brought in