Building Core Values
When I launched Spoke in the 2014 it looked much different. More than anything else, the company was a platform for me to work as an independent consultant. During that time my day to day consisted mostly of sitting at our kitchen table writing emails and passing out business cards that read “digital strategy for hire”. There was a company name and an associated logo but I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to build and the type of work that I wanted to focus my time on. Spoke had a lot of evolving to do to get to where we are today.
This past summer (2016) marks the beginning of our third year in business. Spoke now has a team behind the brand, a set of core competencies that we’ve identified, and a growing number of industry verticals that we are influencing. With this benchmark in mind, I reread (and heavily annotated) Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras’ Built to Last. Unlike some business books that are overwhelming in theory, I appreciate that Collins and Porras ground their work with a very select number of business narratives and case studies. They argue that truly visionary companies are those that are successful over multiple generations of leaders, products and ideas. Contrary to the ideology that pervades startup culture, their research shows that visionary companies are not the result of charismatic, visionary leaders or even the result of great ideas (I wrote on a similar theory in a piece called Genius is a Myth). In fact, they demonstrate that within visionary companies, “their greatest creation is the company itself and what it stands for” (p.23). More than any other element of the book, this inspired me to start thinking about the themes and values behind my own work individually and those behind the larger identity of Spoke.
Visionary companies are premier institutions — the crown jewels — in their industries, widely admired by their peers and having a long track record of making significant impact on the world around them. (Collins & Porras)
The result of this process is a short list of three values that I’ve identified as core tenants of both who we are as a company (present-tense) and who we aspire to be looking forward (aspirational).
Relationships
To develop a deep understanding of our client’s work, market value, and manner of practicing business so that our services produce the highest value.
We see Spoke as a business that is actively working to change the agency-client paradigm. We believe that our industry has historically viewed client relationships as transactional and dominated by retainer budgets, staffing hours, and convoluted project estimates. We believe that we can provide a better end-product to our customers and a more enjoyable service throughout the lifetime of a client by placing a greater emphasis on the people behind the client name. We want to form partnerships and get to know how and why a specific client’s business exists. This not only makes our job as service providers more enjoyable but that proximity to decision-making within a client’s business also means we’re better able to advise and consult on how to design your brand’s customer experience.
Craftsmanship
To commit ourselves to the highest caliber of creative and digital work with the understanding that this requires constantly learning and improving upon our ideas and industry best-practices.
One of the reasons our relationships are so critical is because they provide us with the ability to identify and seek out the most ideal opportunities to explore and perfect our craft. Everyone wants to work on the newest products and ideas but we believe that there is also craftsmanship in taking the mundane (or simply the “not new”) and making it the very best version of itself by leveraging our branding, design, and technology services.
This value of craftsmanship also requires that we come to terms with three realizations:
1. Investment of Resources — the highest quality craft is never going to be the easiest solution
2. Investment of Time — a highly produced end-product requires taking extra steps and making the time to iterate even beyond what would be the normal delivery requirement
3. Investment in Learning — in order to produce the very best deliverable we really must do our due diligence to ensure that we’re staying on top of best practices and industry trends
We recently finished up an animated video project with Marriott that required us to really dig deep into this core value. We’re super excited about the end-result but it did take time and a significant investment beyond what we had originally thought to get to an end-product that the client loved and that we were equally proud to show off.
Innovation
To create solutions for new gaps in the marketplace and to push our own work to the edge of the creative industry.
With a pulse on our company relationships and an investment in high quality craftsmanship, our third pillar is innovation. Broadly speaking, this is a promise to ourselves and to our clients that we are actively pursuing the limits of our own creativity. I internalize this value as a need for both market awareness — meaning we have an obligation to take stock of what’s working in our service offering and note gaps that need to be filled.
Making Values Stick
We’re actively growing a list of processes that will help us codify our company values to ensure that they are both sustainable and increasingly integral to our company culture. I’ve found these four to be the most useful for our particular values thus far:
1. Eliminating Departmental Silos
We believe the boundaries that traditionally exist within an agency between creative, development, client services, and executive departments fail to produce a cohesive, team-based relationship with the individuals that make up the client’s staff. By eliminating these barriers we believe we create better end-products, plain and simple.
2. Increasing Project Proximity
We expect everyone to contribute beyond their job titles and fields of expertise. For us, this means including technical and creative staff from project start to project finish. By increasing the number of staff that have a perspective on the life of the project we believe we are better able to communicate project goals unilaterally, flag client objections or project obstacles, and ultimately produce a more cohesive and thoughtful end-product.
3. Optimizing Autonomy
We believe our team is our greatest resource. By encouraging more self-directed work we can better leverage our own brainpower and creativity to overcome flaws in our technology, to improve our internal processes and to create new solutions for gaps in the marketplace.
4. Encouraging Competition
We believe our greatest limitations are the ones that we set for ourselves. By establishing and sharing our goals and benchmarks against our own personal records, we can raise the tides across project teams, technical departments, and individual staff. We certainly acknowledge our market competitors but we more actively work to compare ourselves to what we did yesterday, a month ago, or this time last year.
Beyond this list, I’ve incorporated language around our values and their significance into our website copy, business proposals, marketing materials, and into my regular client and staff conversations. My goal is to make this discussion of values and value-based decision-making a topic that everyone on our team can champion moving forward.
If this conversation around values is something that you’re even remotely interested in incorporating into your organization, I cannot recommend enough that you snag a copy of Built to Last. I would send you our version but my margin notes would make it very hard to read at this point.
I’d love to hear what you think. Send me a note on Twitter.
