I've got the Conscious Capitalism Summit on my mind as I write this. Specifically, the main Summit (in Dallas this year), which my daughter, Rachel, and I are leaving for tonight. Rachel is one of the keynotes and I couldn't be more proud of her. She will be speaking about the process of writing her first book, Guardians of the Forest, which has been her dream since she was eight-years old and just happened this past January, after a year of work and years of saving up to pay for it (she paid 100% of her savings to her illustrator, Ryan Durney). My good friend, John Mackey, will be introducing her on stage. He has been a mentor to me for years and most recently her, for her book. There are many good lessons for living a fulfilled life in her book and she is certainly an emerging conscious capitalist. You can see all of the speakers here, and in the spirit of the post I wrote at the beginning of this year on continuous learning, I highly recommend you attend this Summit in the future (or the CEO Summit if you qualify).
But I've got the Conscious Capitalism Summit on my mind for another reason, and it is because of what it has taught me as an entrepreneur and CEO. Last year, at the CEO Summit version of their events, I heard a CEO say on stage, "If you want to learn something amazing, just ask each of your employees to share with you the core values that they bring to work each and every day." This immediately resonated with me as I had been thinking about how beautiful our culture was becoming at data.world but yet we hadn't written our core values down yet. This isn't that unusual, by the way. We didn't write down our core values at my previous VC-backed startups, Coremetrics and Bazaarvoice, until we were around this age. You want to get some operating history and some significant team build-out going before you do this exercise or it is just aspirational with no real resonance for how you've actually been living your day-to-day business life as a collective.
So, I decided to test this method as a way to form our core values. After the Summit, I asked each of our employees to privately direct-message me on Slack with one or two of the values they bring into work each day. This is exactly what I sent:
"Team, in preparation for our Lunch & Learn on Wednesday to discuss our Operating Principles, please take one minute to send me the one or two values that you personally bring into our team. Such as "integrity", "passion", "caring", "precision", etc. - whatever you think your most important one or two values are. Please DM them to me by end of day tomorrow and I'll share the results at the L&L."
You may be wondering about the Operating Principles reference, so let me digress on that for a brief moment. Even though we hadn't worked together to write down our core values, we had worked together to form our operating principles and we reviewed them every quarter. This was in the spirit of the Netflix culture deck that I originally learned about during the Bazaarvoice days (and I've spoken with Reed Hastings about it at TED). If you haven't heard about this deck, you are really missing out and I think this is the latest version.
Ok, back to the core values exercise. The responses I received back were beautiful. They all resonated with me so deeply, with the exception of one person's response of "Terseness" (but he is an incredible team member with a great sense of humor, including creating a machine learning bot that roams our Slack and literally mimics my co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Jon Loyens, who has a larger-than-life personality). I immediately started to compile these responses into a document, and I'll share a version of it with you now. The only thing I changed in this version is our employees' names, so I'm protecting their confidentiality since I didn't ask them for their permission. In the spreadsheet, you'll see that I compiled exact word matches and also looked at related words to come up with our proposed core values.
When I presented these results at the Lunch & Learn, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive and I suggested that we adopt these as our core values because "without each of your incredible work, each and every day, there is no company and there are no values". Everyone agreed. And I've made sure to ask new team members, as they've joined us, to DM me in the same way as the original team did last year. I recompile every time, but so far the top five core values - Determination, Passion, Community, Integrity, and Curiosity - haven't changed.
data.world is my sixth startup. I do my best to constantly evolve - to do better as an entrepreneur and leader in each business. And this is my favorite method of coming up with core values so far. It is the most inclusive and the most organically beautiful way that I've ever done it. I discuss this and much more on Kirk Dando's podcast, For You Leaders (here's that episode). What is your method? And what is the best method you've ever seen? I would love to learn from you in the comments below!
Thanks again to Conscious Capitalism for inspiring me each year. I'm looking forward to tomorrow!
Conscious Capitalism 2018 here we come!