What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

As a child, Louverture was so frail his parents called him “Sickly Stick” and did not expect him to live. Yet by age twelve, he had surpassed all the boys on the plantation with his athletic feats. In time he became known as the colony’s greatest horseman. Even as he neared sixty, he often rode 125 miles in a day.

Louverture was just five feet two and by no means handsome. Laconic, with a stern, probing glance, he was immensely energetic and focused. He slept two hours a night and could live for days on a few bananas and a glass of water. His education, position, and character gave him tremendous prestige among his fellow slaves long before the revolution. He never doubted that his destiny was to be their leader.

While still a teenager, he was made caretaker of the estate’s mules and oxen—a post usually held by a white man. Louverture seized this rare opportunity to educate himself in his free time and to read through his master’s library, including Julius Caesar’s Commentaries and Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, or History of two Indies, an encyclopedic account of trade between Europe and the Far East. Caesar’s work helped him understand politics and the art of war, and Raynal’s gave him a thorough grounding in the economics of the region and of Europe.

But his education and position did not exempt him from the fundamental indignity of being black. One day, as he was returning from Mass carrying his prayer book, a white man took notice. Louverture would recall that the man “broke my head with a wooden stick while telling me ‘do you not know that a negro should not read?’” Louverture apologized and stumbled home. He kept the vest soaked with his blood as a reminder of the incident. Years later, after the rebellion began, he met his tormenter again and, his biographer Philippe Girard writes with satisfaction, “killed him on the spot.”

The estate’s attorney, François Bayon de Libertat, recognized Louverture’s abilities and made him coachman. Around 1776, he freed Louverture; Louverture was now paid to drive Libertat’s coach. At the time, fewer than one in a thousand black men were set free. The father of the Haitian Revolution earned his freedom by forming a special bond with a white man.

Louverture used every carriage ride with Libertat to expand his network, making contact with nearly all of his future allies. The rides also enabled him first to understand, and then to master, French colonial ways. Louverture gradually came to a realization that no one else in colonial Saint-Domingue had arrived at: culture, not color, determined behavior.

One astonishing demonstration of this truth was that after he’d been freed, Louverture purchased slaves, usually to free them in turn. But he also strove to get ahead in the colonial manner, the only manner available to him at that point: off of slave labor. In 1779, in a brief and unsuccessful attempt to make money, he leased a coffee plantation worked by thirteen slaves. One of them was Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who in later years would become his second in command—and then go on to betray him.

If there was a motivational trigger for Louverture to turn from commerce to statecraft, perhaps it came in 1784, when he read a famous passage written by Abbé Raynal, a proponent of liberty who hoped for a slave revolt: “A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he, that great man whom Nature owes to her vexed, oppressed, and tormented children? Where is he?” According to one account, Louverture read this passage over and over, dreaming that he might be that courageous chief.

LOUVERTURE’S RISE

Once news of the French Revolution of 1789 reached the island, insurrection was in the air. The initial rebellion on the Manquets plantation in 1791 stirred up slaves on the surrounding plantations, and within a few years the insurrectionary force grew to fifty thousand men, one hundred times the size of the largest slave revolt in U.S. history.

Louverture had known of and perhaps helped shape plans for the uprising, but he waited to see how it would go, only joining in a month after it began. The colony’s political situation was extremely complicated, with numerous factions, parties, and shifting alliances, and it was unclear what would happen on your plantation next week, let alone to the whole island over time.

When Louverture joined the rebels he was about forty-seven and already known as “Old Toussaint.” Within a few months he had appointed himself brigadier general and was leading one of the three chief rebel groups. To build support, Louverture implied that he was acting on behalf of the French king, Louis XVI, who, he said, had issued him a document promising the rebels three days of rest a week in exchange for their efforts. He was able to pull off this ruse because almost none of his followers could read and write.

Between 1791 and 1793, he and the rebels made such progress that France dispatched eleven thousand troops to hold them back—more than the nation sent abroad during the U.S. War of Independence.

After Louis XVI was guillotined in Paris in 1793, the British and Spanish invaded Saint-Domingue, each hoping to seize the prize while France was preoccupied. Once Spain declared war on France, Louverture went to the Spanish commander and offered to integrate his six hundred men into the Spanish army, which other rebellious slave groups were also joining. And so Louverture became a colonel in the Spanish army, fighting the French.

The following year, seeing an advantage for himself and his troops, Louverture defected to the French army. Within a year, he and his men, now five thousand strong, had retaken almost all of the French towns he had just conquered for Spain, and subdued several rebel groups still allied with the Spanish. These victories, in concert with military setbacks in Europe, forced Spain to sue for peace. Louverture had defeated his first European superpower.

Next he faced the British, who had sent two large battalions to Saint-Domingue. Unprepared to tackle a large professional army, Louverture began retreating in 1795 and maintained a defensive posture for two years, even as the remaining blacks on the island, some 500,000 men in all, joined his side. Time, guerrilla skirmishing, and yellow fever wore down Louverture’s foes. Twelve thousand of the twenty thousand British soldiers who arrived on the island were buried there, and in 1798 Louverture negotiated the departure of their remaining forces. He had defeated his second European superpower.

In 1801 he invaded Santo Domingo, the Spanish part of the island that is now the Dominican Republic, and defeated the Spanish for good. On July 7, 1801, he became governor of the entire island where he had once been a slave. He promptly published a new constitution. Saint-Domingue would still be a French colony, in name, but the constitution abolished slavery, opened all jobs to all races, and made the territory functionally independent. In just ten years Louverture and his army had accomplished the unimaginable.

HOW LOUVERTURE REPROGRAMMED SLAVE CULTURE

In 1797, in the midst of the long revolt, Louverture demonstrated that he could not only lead troops, but also persuade and inspire civilians with his vision for a new way of life. Vincent de Vaublanc, a white deputy from Saint-Domingue, warned the French Parliament that the colony had fallen under the control of “ignorant and brutish negroes.” Vaublanc’s speech had a tremendous impact, and there were rumors of a counterrevolution being plotted in Paris.

Louverture’s response was to publish a justification of the Haitian Revolution that laid out his theory of race and culture. As Philippe Girard wrote, “One by one he listed Vaublanc’s accusations; one by one he took them apart. Blacks were not lazy and ignorant savages: slavery had made them so. Some violence had indeed taken place in the Haitian Revolution, but violence had also taken place in the French Revolution, he reminded his readers; the slaves had in fact proved remarkably merciful toward the planters who had so cruelly oppressed them.” Louverture demonstrated that these former slaves had elevated their culture to a point where he could in justice close the letter by reaffirming black freedmen’s “right to be called French Citizens.”

In 1798, after Louverture negotiated peace and a diplomatic relationship with the British, the London Gazette wrote:

Toussaint L’Ouverture is a negro and in the jargon of war has been called a brigand. But according to all accounts, he is a negro born to vindicate the claims of this species and to show that the character of men is independent of exterior color.

This newspaper, in a nation that traded more African slaves than any other, published that encomium thirty-five years before Britain abolished slavery. As Louverture had envisioned, Europeans were beginning to see that it was the culture of slavery rather than the nature of the slaves themselves that shaped their behavior.

Some Americans began to see it that way, too. In 1798, during a rift with France, the U.S. Congress banned all trade with France and its colonies. Commerce to and from Saint-Domingue came to a standstill. Louverture sent a man named Joseph Bunel to see the U.S. secretary of state, Thomas Pickering, about lifting 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 leaders with that knowledge.

I often see companies that plan to go into new areas, but don’t want to shift their culture accordingly. Many consumer companies want to penetrate the enterprise market—that is, selling to big companies—but resist having employees who walk around in fancy suits. They believe that their original culture should suffice. But their results prove otherwise.