Corporate Culture

The single critical success factor pervasive throughout all others is culture. Our culture is the norm of our behavior and a guiding influence on everything we do. Our business model and culture is a product of the company's 23 shared values. Corporate culture and shared values are the underpinning of our corporate strategy. Our corporate culture is a product of management vision, leadership example, clear expectations, open communications, employee empowerment, team member contributions and continual company and personal advancement.

 

Our culture is built around entrepreneurship, aggressive achievement and consistent growth. We achieve our cultural goals when we respect all shared values and we continually learn, work hard, think smart and move quickly. It is not the big that beat the small, it is the fast that beat the slow.

 

We will reward innovation and resourcefulness. We value team members whom strive for excellence and hate to lose. We look for and reward competitive individuals who know what it takes to win. As a company policy, we shall behave today like the company we aspire to be tomorrow. We will therefore conduct ourselves as the successful, larger, more mature and more accountable organization we will become.

 

Preparing ourselves in advance will render growth challenges more anti-climatic, reduce the chaos which comes with growth and result in more of a managed growth environment (also a lot nicer place to live). Management is committed to achieving a corporate culture made up of good people and exceptional performers where we can genuinely enjoy the working relationships with our colleagues.

 

We like what we do, we're proud of our work and we will create an enviable brand and reputation in our local area and market niche. To maintain our culture, we will set clear expectations, reward positive behaviors and maintain a close eye in recruiting to only bring in individuals that can coexist in the environment we strive for.

 

A Culture of Discipline

Most entrepreneurial organizations reach chaos and implement bureaucracy (SOPs, rules, policies, etc.) to remedy the chaos.

• Bureaucracy is implemented to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline - a problem which can be preventatively mitigated if you have the right people on the bus. Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of the wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of the wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for more incompetence and lack of discipline.
• The alternative - Avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline. A culture of discipline + entrepreneurship = superior performance and sustained results. A  culture of discipline has nothing to do with command and control or being an authoritarian. 

How to create a culture of discipline:

1. Get the right people on the bus. People who are self-disciplined. Trying to discipline the wrong people into the right behaviors is futile.
1. Words that describe the right people include disciplined, rigorous, dogged, determined, systemic, demanding, focused, accountable, etc. The words are a distinguishing variable between G2G companies and comparison companies.

2. Achieve disciplined thought. First, face the brutal facts of reality while retaining absolute conviction that you can and will create a path to success (the Stockdale paradox?). Second, don't stray from our hedgehog concept.
3. Disciplined action. The prior two items are precursors. Jumping right into action will fail. 
4. To Undo List/Stop Doing List. Unplug distractions and extraneous junk.

A cornerstone of our culture is the idea of freedom and responsibility within a framework: so long as people stay within the wide bounds of the framework, they have an immense amount of freedom to innovate, achieve and contribute.

 

People in our system understand that they do not have “jobs”— they have responsibilities—and they grasp the distinction between just doing assigned tasks and taking full responsibility for the results of their efforts.

 

We avoid bureaucracy that imposes unnecessary rules on self-motivated and self-disciplined people; if we have the right people, they don’t need a lot of rules.