On the heels of establishing Culture Foundry’s core purpose as a company, articulating our core values was the next logical step. While arriving at a core purpose was surprisingly challenging, our list of core values came together surprisingly easily.
This seemed like a good sign. While core purpose articulates the “why” of a company (and typically takes some time to hone), core values articulate the “how” and should naturally emerge as reflective of how a company operates when it’s at its best.
This makes core values very useful as practical tools, and they should be specific enough to guide company decisions, particularly challenging ones. At Culture Foundry, these values go on flags, and these flags get waved frequently. Just ask anyone at the company about how often I wave the “delivery” flag (value #2) when there’s a decision to be made about approach or priorities.
At Culture Foundry, we value:
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Beautiful technology. We’re most comfortable in the wild borderlands where strategy, design and technology become inseparable.
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Delivery. We are scored on delivery. No excuses. No politics. No points for perfect problems.
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Collaboration. We team with clients to build long-term relationships on a foundation of trust, transparency and shared humanity.
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Shine. We take pride in a job well done, then take it further with the extra insight, detail or “aha” that’s remembered long after the launch date has passed.
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Thrive. We strive to grow to the next level of impact, knowledge and skill to raise the prospects of our clients, communities and shared world.
Each value merits its own post on how we’ve used it in on-the-ground decision making. (If a value is linked, that means that post has since been added — click through for the details.) These values themselves have also evolved as we’ve grown.
Another interesting exercise we tackled was to flip the coin and articulate some values (and standard industry practices) we specifically don’t believe in. More on that soon.