In most companies, there is always a mission statement and a list of core values set forth by the management. There is no exception even for an organization as small as this one.
Yet I (@simkimsia) have a personal distaste for such documents.
My personal distaste is not because I disagree the importance and the necessity of such documents. In fact, I strongly feel that all organizations ought to have a mission statement and a list of core values. These are the foundations that underline the direction and culture of a company.
My distaste stems from the observation that in most organizations, these statements eventually become lip service and the general feeling working in such organizations is that even the management no longer believe in the mission statement or the core values set forth by the founding members. In other words, my distaste is because of distrust. Distrust of the core values exhibited by people who are supposed to work according to these very same core values.
My suspicion is that trust and belief in these mission statements and core values are not regularly renewed. Regular renewal therefore should require at least the key members to regularly set aside time to revise the values.
The best way I know to make any documents easily revisable is GitHub.
Hence this values document is on GitHub.
As of this moment, I am the sole director of this organization. I have just hired my own sibling as an employee. I am the one and only key member of this organization at the moment.
It is my intention to grow this organization eventually to include more key members, even if it means I eventually am no longer a key member of the organization I started.
Now that I have clarified the current organization structure, I will set forth with the first iteration of this organization's core values.
The structure will be based on Simon Sinek's golder circles, i.e. WHY, HOW, and WHAT.
We want to leave the world a better place before we arrived on the scene.
We intend to accomplish this through technology.
We sell :
- software services and products
- software-skills mastery services and products
There are only 4 criteria to consider when developing products and services.
In descending order of importance:
- Make our customers' lives better (better itself is broken down into happier, easier, and more profitable).
- Make our products and services beautiful and easy to maintain.
- Make our products and services beautiful and easy to extend.
- Make it beautiful and easy for us to develop new products and services.
While four criteria are stated in four separate lines, it does not follow that all four are equal or similarly proportioned in importance.
A useful way to look at this is to assume a totality of 100% in importance and distributed in these 4 criteria.
- 90% - Make our customers' lives better (better itself is broken down into happier, easier, and more profitable).
- 7% - Make our products and services beautiful and easy to maintain.
- 2.9% - Make our products and services beautiful and easy to extend.
- 0.1% - Make it beautiful and easy for us to develop new products and services.
In other words, 90% of importance is focused on making our customers' lives better. The 99% of the remaining is to make the artifacts of our products and services easy to maintain and extend.
Our ease in developing new products and services is not only the last of the four criteria, percentage-wise it is almost negligible. Almost is the keyword. Because it is still important enough to make our lives easy as well. Because we are not complete martyrs and idiots.