Q. How do you define your
culture?
When we had about 20 people, we really liked our company, we liked our culture,
we liked the feeling; we had
no definition for it at the
time.
But we kind of liked the
‘big’ feeling, and so we said
to ourselves, ‘What is it that
makes it so great here?’ We
broke it down into people
and what qualities those
people had that, if we just
had 100 of these three people, we could just change
the world.
So, what are those adjectives that define those people? Then, pare it back even
further to say, ‘What are the
top five or six or seven?’ I
think we’re at eight that
really define who we are
and who we want to be and
who we want to continue to
be because we liked where
we were.
Then, our next step was to
look at the leadership team
and say, ‘OK, do we have
these things, because if we
don’t, it’s going to be very
hard to live by them.’ So, if
I’m not detailed, that can’t
really be one of our cultural
values because how am I
going to lead by example?
How am I going to teach
people how to be detailed,
how are we going to do that
if we are not inherently ourself — which is not to say
that every person in the
organization on a scale of 1
to 10 needs to be a 10 in all
of the cultural values because
you aren’t going to find that.
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