Our operating principles, defined.

If you’ve worked with me for just about any period of time, you know how important organizational culture is to me. Over the years, I’ve helped several businesses and business units transform their culture. 

• Some were a cesspool of toxicity. Others were just stagnant. 

• Some required core values development for a sales team. Others a complete, foundational development of principles company-wide. 

• Some required cleaning up. Others required cleaning house. 

Every business is different, but the goal was always the same:

To create an environment that made hiring and retaining phenomenal people possible.  

Building a great team can be like building a great family: There’s no clear definition of “great,” there’s no single way to create it, and you can do everything right and still have some individual assholes.

Similarly, even though you don’t control everything, there’s unquestionable evidence to suggest that proactively defining what you are looking for dramatically improves the likelihood of actually achieving it. 

As such, it won’t come as a surprise to most of my colleagues, then, that we set guidelines that describe the way we work with each other here at my own company. Those guidelines affect how we interact with our vendors, teammates, and clients.

This post is intended to publicly share our principles, which serve as the standard for how we aspire to engage all our stakeholders. 

Our Operating Principles

1. The way we do anything is the way we do everything.
   
   We don’t halfass something because we’re “too good for it.” If we take the work, we are going to do it as well as we can. This isn’t my quote and I attribute it to Ryan Holiday, a favorite author of mine. Holiday has also quoted Sir Henry Royce on this subject by saying, “Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble.” — Sir Henry Royce.
   

2. Asking for help and admitting we don’t know something is a strength, not a weakness.
   
   We are seeking to actually know, not look like we know. Epictetus sums this up quite nicely in Discourses by writing, “For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.” We focus on having knowledge, not the appearance of having it.
   

3. Growth requires the courage to address, not avoid, doing the hard things.
   
   All forms of growth require discomfort. That’s true in the gym, in relationships, and in business. If we avoid the easy road now, count on the hard road in the future.

4. Don’t confuse motion with progress.
   
   This is actually a quote of Alfred Armand’s in his book, The Supreme Philosophy of Man: The Laws of Life. As Holiday, noted above, has asked, “What are the chances the busiest person you know in life is the most productive?” There’s nothing wrong with hard work, but outputs matter far more than inputs.

5. “Success leads to complacency. Complacency leads to failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
   
   This quote from Intel co-founder Andy Grove is easily my favorite, and teams I’ve led can often finish it for you. In fact, I once had it printed on five shirts and wore them each day of the week for almost two months. We strive for success, but often don’t prepare for what it brings, which then leads to failure in the midst of celebration. We won’t rest on our laurels.
   

6. Solutions are better than shortcuts.
   
   Regardless of whether we are looking at things in the short-run or the long-run, we are seeking solutions to problems, not sloppy shortcuts. We aren’t opposed to finding the most efficient way of solving a problem, after all, we don’t confuse motion with progress. But we are committing to solving problems that need to be solved, not slapping bandaids on symptoms.
   

7. Strong leadership requires humility.
   
   We don’t think strength has much correlation to asshole. Humility is required for empathy, good communication, and learning, all of which are necessary for effective leadership, regardless of title or rank.
   

8. Money is renewable. Time is not.
   
   This is a simple truth of life, and when we are making critical decisions, we reference this routinely. Is this the best use of our time? Will we add real value here? Is this something we want to do? Because, we can make more money, but we can’t get our time back. And making money doing shit we don’t love to do, or weren’t built for, is no way to waste our lives.
   

9. We are what we do, not what we talk about.
   
   Having been in sales for more than 20 years, I’m well aware of the power of words. I’m also aware of the power to use them to talk through - or to - issues while our actions tell a different story. We will build trust with everyone we interact with by letting our actions tell our story. 

These are the principles we use as our North Star and what we aspire to every day. And they are what I expect of myself as well. These aren’t platitudes on a wall, they are the principles that were developed after taking a very close look at what matters to me and what has mattered to me my entire career. 

Will we fail to live up to them? Yep. Undoubtedly. We are all human. And when we do, we’ll reference them again to assess how to respond.