Status Quack Manifesto

Intro

For quite some time we had been internally discussing principles and reasons why are we running the studio. Why we are dedicating our free time in taking this company from the ground. This led us to create a manifesto for newcomers and for us to have value guidance in every decision.

Without further ado, let me simply paste here a document we internally use for onboarding new members.

A Duck Manifesto

Welcome

Creation of this document was inspired by the book Principles by Ray Dalio, video sum-up. The goal is to introduce you Status Quack culture so you can be expecting our values, working principles and the answer to mother of all questions, why are we doing it.

Values

1. Curiosity — in our vocabulary it represents the state of mind that you always want to understand why certain things work that specific way and why are we supposed to do it the way someone suggests. It’s okay to say NO to a client if you don’t see the purpose of doing that work
2. Honesty — we are honest to each other, to our clients, to our beloved ones; a golden rule we try to follow: communicate bad news as soon as possible
3. Society — we care about the environment we live in and we behave accordingly. We are interested in culture, politics, and nature, and facilitate their improvements as we can.

If you distill the values above you will get the rules of how we work. From the beginning, we started the company as a remote firm. You can work from anywhere you want to as long as you keep the promises. We work in pairs (at least) on every project to reduce biases. We embrace feedback, internally and on any client work. We are transparent about who works on what, how much who gets paid, and pretty much everything you might be interested about, we encourage you to be curious and ask questions.

Who we work with

We have a simple rule. We work with people who follow our values. Usually, a good signal is a push for a mutual trust over signing NDAs and having a scaffolding of legislative documents.

We believe that every one of us is the face of the company, therefore, we encourage you to behave that way and kindly put, our network is yours and vice versa. To make it real, you get shares of the Status Quack company once you are a part of the core team, which we distribute on a regular basis.

Who we like to work with

One of our values is a society which can sound broad. Let us illustrate it on a few examples:

We support any kind of activity or business which is not harming the environment and civil, democratic society. We prioritize projects adding value to those.

Areas we are passionate about the most:

1. Education — we love contributing to this field. Innovative efforts can expect great support from us
2. Circular economy aspect — we are very much aligned with the idea of using products to their maximum
3. Government — we are trying to be apolitical as much as possible, but working on government projects is something very exciting for us, especially if we have the possibility to deliver a better experience to citizens

What makes us different

On the general level, we are different mainly through our values and approach towards our clients. We take full responsibility for showing trends and the bigger picture with all the positives, negatives and risks. We aim for the best intention and protecting the client from bad decisions.

How are we different in a more practical way:

• From design studios 📐

We are not only designers. We have built our companies and we know what it takes to start from a scratch and deliver sustainable business solution. We do love crafting experiences around the business, but we still focus on the business itself — We aim to create sustainable projects with the well-understood value they create.

• From consultants 👔

We deliver solutions. We try to avoid to be consultants because the beauty lies in getting our hands dirty, prototyping ideas, iterating. Testing the strategies is as exciting for us as coming up with them.

• From innovation agencies 💡

We can’t promise a successful innovation simply because there is no formula for success. We promise to follow the methodologies and methods to reduce the risk and give you the best chance possible to succeed. We win when you win…

And hey! Welcome on board. Let’s quack the status quo together.

Martin, Nathalie, Jan, Zuzka & Jiří

That's all folks

I am more than happy to hear feedback because I fully realize how fluffy and abstract some thoughts can seem. Also if you think of creating your own statement, let me know, I am more than happy to jump on a call with you.