What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture. Ben Horowitz
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you stop reading this book and go tell your friends that the slave who led the Haitian Revolution was called “Father” by the white women of the colony, they won’t believe you, because it’s unbelievable. But it’s true. Such is the power of ethics.
By 1801, Louverture’s massive investment in the culture began to pay off. With blacks and mulattoes running the country, cultivation had been restored to two-thirds of its peak level under the French. Integrity proved its worth.
WHAT HAPPENED TO LOUVERTURE?
The end of Louverture’s story is dismaying. After Louverture wrote his constitution in 1801, Napoleon became furious at this display of independence and decided to overthrow him. The following year, Louverture’s second in command, the fierce General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, coordinated a double cross with Napoleon’s top general in Saint-Domingue. Louverture was arrested at a diplomatic meeting and sent by ship to France, where he would spend the brief remainder of his days being badly treated in a French jail. He died of a stroke and pneumonia on April 7, 1803. Meanwhile, Napoleon began restoring slavery throughout the Caribbean. It was this, in great part, that led Dessalines to turn against Napoleon. He united all rebel factions under him, defeated Napoleon’s army, and declared independence in January 1804. He changed the country’s name to Haiti, and later that year had himself proclaimed emperor.
Dessalines completed the revolution that Louverture had spearheaded for so long, but he promptly made two decisions that Louverture would have abhorred: he ordered that most of the French whites in Haiti be put to death and he nationalized all private land, abruptly reversing much of the cultural and economic headway that Louverture had made. Though the French would eventually give Haiti diplomatic recognition in 1825, they would also exact cruel reparations for Dessalines’s shortsighted decisions, forcing Haiti to pay the modern equivalent of $21 billion for France’s loss of its slaves and plantations. These events continue to haunt the country, which remains the poorest in the Western world.
Sad story, but how could it happen? How could Louverture, genius of culture and human nature that he was, not perceive the brewing treachery? In a sense, he was like the Greek hero Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx but who couldn’t clearly see those closest to him. Louverture’s optimistic view of human potential blinded him to certain home truths.
Because Louverture believed in the French Revolution and the freedoms it claimed to embody, he saw Napoleon as an enlightened product of the revolution rather than as the racist he was. In one outburst, Napoleon said: “I will not rest until I have torn the epaulettes off every nigger in the colonies.”
Because of Louverture’s loyalty to France, he didn’t declare independence when the French army invaded, which would have united the whole island behind him. He vacillated.
And because Louverture trusted—all too much—that his army would trust him to act for the best, he didn’t grasp that his soldiers were restless about everything from his position on agriculture to his constant efforts to attain a diplomatic solution with France, to his rule against revenge. Louverture did not grasp the emotional power of retribution, whereas Dessalines did.
C. L. R. James put it well: “If Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilization were of the slenderest. He saw what was right under his nose so well because he saw no further. Louverture’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not darkness.”
Yet though Louverture’s culture proved tragically difficult for his flawed subordinate to live up to, it had an enduring power. After Napoleon captured Louverture, he attempted to reinstitute slavery on the island—but was beaten by the army Louverture left behind. Though he was already dead, Louverture defeated his third European superpower. Napoleon suffered more losses in Saint-Domingue than he would at Waterloo, and these reverses forced him to sell Louisiana and parts of fourteen additional states to the United States for $15 million. The French emperor later confessed that he should have ruled the island through Louverture.
HISTORICAL IMPACT
The slave revolution of Saint-Domingue got into the area’s bloodstream and spread from island to island in the Caribbean. Later rebellions in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Curacao, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Louisiana were attributable, at least in part, to Haitian agents and their followers. These rebellions influenced the eventual withdrawal of the French, British, and Spanish empires from the region.
In the United States, Louverture inspired the abolitionist John Brown to launch the raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry, which Brown hoped would prompt the local slaves to rebel. The attack failed and Brown was hanged, but the Harpers Ferry raid escalated tensions that, a year later, led to the South’s secession and the Civil War.
While one of the greatest culture geniuses in history was unable to permanently establish the way of life he hoped for in his home country, he helped shift the Western world from a culture of slavery to one of freedom.
Toussaint Louverture made missteps that locked him up for life, yet he helped liberate us all.
I’m a murderer, n*gg*, but I don’t promote violence.
—Gucci Mane
The techniques Louverture used with rare ingenuity and skill work brilliantly at modern companies.
KEEP WHAT WORKS
When Steve Jobs returned to run Apple in 1997, the company was in bad shape. Really bad shape. Its market share had fallen from 13 percent when Jobs was fired in 1985 to percent, and it was only a quarter’s worth of cash from insolvency. When rival computer maker Michael Dell was asked what should be done with Apple, he said, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
Even within Apple, almost everyone believed the conventional wisdom that the company’s death spiral resulted from what was known as personal computer economics. The theory of PC economics held that because the industry had commoditized PC hardware—there were IBM knockoffs everywhere—the way to make money was not to be a vertically integrated provider that gave the user the machine and its operating system, but to focus on the horizontal option: selling an operating system to run on someone else’s hardware.
Nearly every analyst was pushing Apple to make its Mac OS operating system the company’s product. In 1997, Wired proclaimed: “Admit it. You’re out of the hardware game.” Even Apple’s cofounder, Steve Wozniak, subscribed to this view: “We had the most beautiful operating system,” he said, “but to get it you had to buy our hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake.”
Steve Jobs disregarded that advice. In fact, one of his first acts as CEO was to stop licensing Mac OS to other hardware providers.
The industry’s other article of faith was that companies needed to maximize market share by having a presence in every link of the computer chain, from servers to printers to PCs to laptops. Likewise, they needed to make PCs in all shapes and sizes for every possible user. But Jobs immediately killed the majority of Apple’s products, including most of its PC models, as well as all of its servers and printers and its Newton handheld computer.
Why? Jobs saw the situation entirely differently. At an early all-hands meeting he asked, “Okay, tell me what’s wrong with this place?” He answered his own question: “It’s the products!” He went on to inquire, “So what’s wrong with the products?” and to answer himself again: “The products suck!”
For Jobs, the issue was not the economic structure of the PC industry. Apple just needed to build better products. He would need to transform its culture to make that happen, but it would