What It Takes: Vision, Mission & Culture

Introduction

The speaker introduces the purpose of the workshop and encourages participants to engage with what they want to learn.

Workshop Purpose

• The workshop aims to help participants define their culture.

• Participants filled out a survey beforehand, but it's okay if something else comes up during the class.

Importance of Defining Culture

• There is no answer to how to define culture, as it is unique and specific to each venture and person.

• Defining culture early on is important because if it doesn't get defined by you, it will be defined on its own in a way that may not align with your goals.

Hiring and Culture

The speaker discusses how defining culture can help with hiring.

Defining Culture Before Hiring?

• A participant from City Bricks asks whether they should define their culture before or after hiring co-founders.

• There is no right answer; it depends on whether you want to attract people who align with your values or co-create the culture together.

Tangible Elements of Culture

The speaker explains why having a clear vision, mission, and culture are important for stakeholders.

Importance of Vision, Mission, and Culture

• Having a clear vision and mission helps stakeholders understand what problem you're solving for whom uniquely.

The Importance of Vision, Mission, and Culture

In this section, the speaker emphasizes the importance of having a clear vision, mission, and culture in building a successful company.

Selecting the Right People

• Having a clear vision and mission is fundamental to selecting the right people for your company.

• Hiring people with different values can lead to a lack of alignment and wasted energy.

Importance of Alignment

• A clear vision and mission bring focus, alignment, and help everyone speak the same language.

• Lack of clarity about what you're doing can lead to wasted energies in different directions.

Aligning Teachers with Company Culture

• Aligning teachers with company culture is important for empowering them.

• Giving teachers a culture that empowers them leads to better results than giving them rules or instructions.

Putting it All Together: Vision, Mission, Purpose & Culture

In this section, the speaker ties together all the concepts discussed earlier into building a successful business.

The Importance of Culture

• Successful companies usually have great cultures that make them attractive places to work.

Starting at the Beginning

• Starting a business requires having a clear vision, mission, purpose & culture from the beginning.

The Importance of Vision and Mission

In this section, the speaker emphasizes the importance of having a clear vision and mission for a company. He explains that these are essential for aligning people and empowering them to make decisions.

The Role of Vision and Mission

• A clear vision and mission are important for aligning people in a company.

• Consistency is key in creating a platform that people can rely on.

• Cultural values should be consistent to empower people to make decisions.

Challenges Faced by Startups

• Most startups face challenges such as pivoting, raising money, or discovering they're in the wrong marketplace.

• Culture is crucial in helping startups overcome these challenges.

Storytime: The Importance of Culture

• The speaker shares a story about backing a startup that faced many challenges, including bankruptcy and legal issues.

• Despite these challenges, the company succeeded because it had a consistent culture.

Codifying Culture

In this section, the speaker discusses how to bring culture from an abstract concept into something tangible that can be felt, seen, and touched.

Bringing Culture into Reality

• Codifying culture involves making it tangible so that it can be felt, seen, and touched.

• It's important to understand what culture feels like before trying to codify it.

Understanding Vision vs. Mission

In this section, the speaker addresses confusion around the difference between vision and mission statements.

Vision vs. Mission Statements

• Some companies merge vision and mission statements, while others differentiate between the two.

• The speaker declines to provide examples of previous vision and mission statements.

Defining Your Culture

In this section, the speaker encourages the audience to think about what makes them unique and how that can be used to define their company culture.

What Makes You Unique?

• The speaker asks the audience to think of one thing that makes them uniquely qualified.

• Everyone is encouraged to look within themselves for something unique, whether it's based on personal experience or education.

• Examples are given from two members of the audience: one who is uniquely qualified in building off of other people's ideas, and another who is good at connecting with people and helping them achieve their goals.

Importance of Cultural Strength

• The speaker emphasizes that cultural strength will come through when things get tough.

• The ability to see people for their strengths and connect them with others will be a hugely important factor in sustaining a business.

• The exercise done in the room should also be done with future founders or hires.

Importance of Cultural Alignment

In this section, the speaker emphasizes the importance of cultural alignment in a startup and how it can affect the success of the business in the long run.

Cultural Misalignment Can Be a Problem Down The Road

• A degree off course becomes a mile.

• Startups take 7 to 10 years minimum before they get critical mass to go public.

• If you're culturally misaligned, you'll be all over the place.

Importance of Hiring People with Similar Values

• First three hires should have the same values as you.

• They should care about connecting and building.

• Problem-solving is one of the biggest challenges that people face.

• Breaking down problems into smaller parts helps people figure out how to solve them.

Extracting Values from Potential Hires

In this section, the speaker discusses how to extract values from potential hires during an interview process.

Asking Questions To Determine Shared Values

• Coming up with a question that will draw out somebody's values is key.

• You can find out very quickly whether they think like you by asking questions related to problem-solving or other relevant topics.

Uniqueness in Different Spaces

In this section, the speaker talks about uniqueness in different spaces and how it affects design thinking.

Background Shapes Design Thinking

• Your background causes you to see things differently and approach things differently.

• Architects from different countries will design things differently due to their unique backgrounds.

Unique Vision

In this section, the speaker talks about how everyone is unique and how their backgrounds, personal experiences, past jobs, education, and upbringing make them different from others. The speaker also emphasizes the importance of having a vision.

Importance of Having a Vision

• A vision helps guide you and sets a direction.

• Visions aren't necessarily things that determine your success but they help guide you.

• Having a vision is important because it gives you the basis to set a direction that you can pursue.

• It's not important what the words are but rather that people can clearly understand what you're doing.

Precision of Vision

• At the beginning, it's essential to have a precise and tight vision so people can relate to it right off the bat.

• However, there should be room for growth in the future as customers want to do business with companies that have bigger visions.

Example of Vision

• Gates envisioned a world where every desk had a computer and every home had a computer. This was just an idea at first but now we take it for granted.

• The mobile revolution came out of everyone having phones which led to new industries like mobile banking.

Developing Your Vision

In this section, the speaker discusses the importance of having a clear vision for your venture and how it can help you stay focused on your goals. He encourages participants to develop their own visions by identifying what problem they are uniquely able to solve and what impact they want to have.

Importance of Having a Vision

• A clear vision can help you retain customers, employees, and team members in the long term.

• Developing a vision involves identifying the problem you are uniquely able to solve and what impact you want to have.

• Visions do evolve over time due to changes in technology or customer patterns.

Exercise: Defining Your Vision

• Participants are asked to identify one element that they would like to have in their vision.

• The speaker encourages participants to share their ideas with each other and challenge each other's thinking.

• Examples of good visions include changing people's health by giving better recommendations for supplements or promoting behavioral change through credible information.

Empowering Peer-to-Peer Learning

• Participants are encouraged to continue challenging each other after the workshop ends.

• The speaker emphasizes that peers can ask questions and tease out ideas from each other even if he cannot get around all the tables himself.

Creating a Memorable and Manageable Mission

In this section, the speaker discusses how to create a mission that is memorable and manageable. The speaker uses Sweetgreen's mission as an example and introduces four M's of mission: memorable, manageable, measurable, and motivational.

Four M's of Mission

• Memorable: A mission should be simple and easy to remember.

• Manageable: A mission should be broken down into core values that guide actions.

• Measurable: A mission should be measurable in some way.

• Motivational: A mission should be compelling enough to attract customers, stakeholders, funding, partnerships, and communities.

Sweetgreen's Mission

• Sweetgreen's mission is "reimagine fast food for a new era."

• Their core value is building healthy communities.

Quiz

• The speaker quizzes the audience on whether Sweetgreen's mission is memorable.

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Creating a Memorable Mission

In this section, the speaker discusses the importance of having a memorable mission and shares examples of memorable words chosen by some participants in the class.

Choosing a Memorable Word for Your Mission

• The speaker asks participants to come up with one word that will be memorable in their mission.

• One participant chose "obsessed" because it triggers strong feelings and can be used in any context.

• Another participant chose "data" but recognized that it was not necessarily memorable. However, she plans to use data to help people understand the brain better, which makes it more memorable.

Building Company Culture from the Ground Up

In this section, the speaker talks about building company culture from the ground up and gives an example of how HubSpot built a strong culture.

Starting with Values

• The speaker emphasizes that building a consistent culture is important throughout a venture.

• The speaker gives an example of HubSpot, which built a very strong culture by starting with values.

• HubSpot created a deck outlining their values, which eventually had to be condensed down to five key points.

Amazing Peers as Best Perk

• The speaker highlights one of HubSpot's values: "We believe our best perk is amazing peers."

• This value stands out because it prioritizes having great colleagues over traditional perks like healthcare or foosball.

Building a Differentiated Culture

In this section, the speaker talks about how every business is ultimately reliant on its people and how having amazing peers can lead to success. He also discusses the importance of identifying values when building a company culture.

Identifying Values for Company Culture

• The best way to start building a culture is to identify your values.

• One value your company needs and why? Clues: something that you share with family and friends, non-negotiable value, something that will get you through difficult situations.

• Example of values identified by the group: grit, passion, dignity, mental health, ownership, empathy, networking EQ, integrity, care, optimism, fairness, growth mindset.

Importance of Amazing Peers in Building Company Culture

• Having amazing peers can make you more likely to succeed than companies that don't care about their people.

• Focusing on building a company with amazing peers who can solve problems together can lead to great things.

Defining Company Values

• It's important to reduce your vision and mission down to a few key values that are critical for your company.

• Example of one of the speaker's company values: actively evolve.

Establishing Company Values

In this section, the speaker discusses the importance of establishing company values and how they can evolve to support a company's vision and mission. The speaker encourages the audience to have a dialogue about their values as peers or co-founders.

Importance of Agreeing on Company Values

• The speaker asks the audience to circle one value that they would need when things get tough.

• If team members cannot agree on basic things like values, it will be challenging for them to work together when things get tough.

• It is important to attract people who have similar considerations regarding company values.

Examples of Company Values

• Two groups came up with "empathetic resilience" and "integrity" as their top values.

• Passion is an essential value that takes grit, persistence, and integrity.

Culture as an Operating System

• The speaker describes culture as an operating system for a company that empowers people rather than running apps.

Startup Secret: The Power of Culture

In this section, the speaker talks about the importance of culture in a startup and how it can empower teams to do great things. He uses an example from Enterprise Rent-A-Car to illustrate his point.

Importance of Culture

• Enterprise Rent-A-Car's response to 9/11 showed the power of a strong culture.

• A powerful culture is one where the team does the right thing even when not being watched.

• A good culture empowers people and enables them to make a difference in the world.

Creating a Strong Culture

• Shared values are important for creating a strong culture.

• Guiding principles like putting the customer first can help align diverse teams.

• There is no right answer to whether the team or customer comes first, but it's important to have an explanation that aligns with your values.

Culture and Accountability

In this section, the speaker discusses the importance of culture in a company and how to hold people accountable for living up to it.

Testing Your Company's Culture

• Discussing how you will live your company's culture is important.

• Use real-life examples to test your culture.

• Address customer complaints by apologizing and explaining why you can't deliver on a promise.

Putting Culture into Practice

• Cultural values are the operating system that makes a company successful through difficult times.

• Hold people accountable for living up to your company's culture.

• Identify one behavior that is critical for your venture and model it.

Examples of Critical Values

• Honesty is important because it creates transparency in the environment.

• Respect is important because it helps create a high productive environment for the company.

The Value of Respect

In this section, the speaker talks about the value of respect in a company and how it can be empowering and enabling for a business.

Respect as a Deep Value

• Respect is not just for each other but also for the company.

• It can be applied to various aspects such as customers, work, etc.

• A deep value that is authentic can be empowering and enabling for a business.

Navigating New Situations

In this section, the speaker discusses navigation in new situations and how it requires honesty, respect, and EQ.

Navigation Requires Honesty and Respect

• Being able to navigate new situations requires honesty and respect.

• EQ is also important in navigating these situations.

• Staying cohesive as a team is crucial.

Embodying Culture Physically

In this section, the speaker talks about embodying culture physically in a simple way by using Amazon's example of taking off the door from its hinges to make it his desk.

Be Frugal

• Jeff Bezos took off the door from its hinges to make it his desk when he started Amazon.

• This embodies Amazon's culture of being frugal.

• Embodiment of culture should be something people could touch every day.

Operationalizing Culture

In this section, the speaker discusses operationalizing culture by making it personal to you.

Make It Personal

• Culture should be something you can relate to personally.

• You can engage with your culture by acting on things like reducing prices or improving delivery.

• Frameworks like "faster or cheaper" help make decisions easier.

Protecting Privacy

In this section, the speaker talks about how privacy is a key feature of Apple's products and how it is important to protect privacy in any company.

Apple and Privacy

• Apple fought against the government to protect their users' privacy.

• The iPhone is advertised for its privacy features.

• It's important not to make promises that you can't keep because people will laugh at you.

Good Communication

• Good communication is essential for a company's culture to thrive.

• Communication can be done informally or formally, but it should never be assumed.

• Companies need to constantly reinforce and re-communicate their values, vision, and mission as things change around them.

Testing Communication

• The acid test for good communication is when someone can explain back what was communicated to them with 100% fidelity.

• Surveys are sent out regularly to test if the message is getting through.

• Listening to customers' needs and pain points is crucial for building a strong business.

Rewarding Failure

• Rewarding failure can encourage employees to try new things and lead to breakthroughs.

• Firing someone for making mistakes may discourage innovation.

Tacos for Culture

In this section, the speaker talks about how they use tacos as a way to recognize and reward team members who embody their company culture.

Using Tacos to Recognize Team Members

• The company uses tacos as a way to recognize and reward team members who embody their company culture.

• Team members can give each other up to five tacos per day for things like supporting a teammate in a difficult situation or coming up with a mental health solution.

• At the end of the month, the number of tacos received is used to determine who is the "Kick-Ass team member."

• The reason they chose tacos is because one team member loves them and National Taco Day is important to her.

Culture vs. Playbook

In this section, the speaker talks about how culture differentiates companies from each other and why it's important to focus on building a strong company culture.

Southwest Airlines' Success

• Southwest Airlines' success is attributed not just to their playbook but also their unique company culture.

• As Herb Kelleher said, anyone can copy their playbook but no one can copy their culture.

Building a Great Company

• Building a great company requires finding cultural consistency that aligns with your vision and mission.

• This cultural consistency should be communicated, reinforced consistently, and lived by everyone in the organization.