Focused Company Operating Principles

> In reality though it's really hard to make these things true.

Yeah, the best example I saw of this was:

   * a small company (under 50 employees)

   * a very deliberate values gathering process across all the employees, not just senior leaders

   * performance reviews and spot bonuses tied to values sightings

   * regular review of how the values fit with current efforts

Just like anything else with a group of people, it takes a lot of work to get it right. Inertia is powerful.

There’s a good model by or popularized by Patrick Lencioni that I’ve rarely seen. It sorts values into aspirational, accidental/historical reality, permission-to-play (I.e. mandatory values in your industry), and the rest. According to the model, the rest are the only good ones. You rarely see them because the other three types are easy and safe to say to leadership.

These were not designed by leadership. I am pretty cynical of values as well, and these bubbled out of a few sr engineers who cared about helping new folks assimilate to our engagement style quickly.

happy to talk more about it

It's especially funny when a two or three person company writes something like this ... But it's perfect if you want to be a consultant to a major university.

A few years ago I participated in a committee of individual contributors tasked with proposing a set of core values to management (who would then integrate it into their core values and propose it to execs…who would then integrate it into their core values and propose it to the PE Board and…)

Not sure what happened between us and the other nodes on that telephone game but these exact four “core values” (enron) popped out.

A couple years later, 100% of the ICs on that committee are still around. Most of the management layer and nearly all of the exec layer are gone.

we talk about this in our onboarding. Its why we have two guiding docs, values & operating principles.

The values are active and hopefully not aspirational, master your craft, listen first, learn why. We stole from the famous netflix deck to create them and they boiled out of our first few employees.

The operating principles are different. They came from a couple sr folks while we were hiring pretty aggressively. They had the job of training and onboarding and wanted to encapsulate how we engage more tactically. I like them, my favorite is exothermic, i would have never created them though, which is cool to see.

So many pitfalls here, but it’s great when it actually works.

In my experience, you can describe a culture that exists, which is useful for onboarding, but you can’t impose a culture just by writing down the one you wish you had. When the Netflix deck first came out I saw a lot of people posting “we should adopt this culture!” because they didn’t understand this.

What creates a culture is mostly just an accumulation of what behavior and speech gets rewarded and punished over time by peers and the power hierarchy. It’s good to consciously “garden” the culture when the group is small and there can be consensus on this, because it rapidly becomes uncontrollable as the group grows.

And then, especially in larger groups, the ones writing the culture down may not really be in touch with the culture, or if they are, may not want to write down the truth because it doesn’t sound good in public or just runs into the observer paradox when you say it out loud.

good catch. Fixed