A short, practical how-to from Bill Gallagher for founders/early-stage companies on creating corporate values: list ideal and undesirable people, record the traits prompting those choices, then distill those traits into 4–6 short-phrase values. Convert negative traits into their positive opposites to clarify desired behaviors.
You want to create great corporate values. You've read about values. You know they make a difference. You know, they help define a great culture. But you've got an early stage company. So how do you do mission to Mars? How do you figure out like your best people that are going to go to Mars and really define the company when you don't have anybody? Here's the simple way to do it. Think about the company you're building. Think about the people you've worked with in the past. Make a list of the people that hypothetically you'd love to have on this team. Now. Make a. I mean, you could add five to eight of these people, 10 or more. If you've got a couple people collaborating on this, you could each think of a few people. All right, so we also want to make a list of the people that we would never want in the company. They might be people that you actually like as human beings, friends even, but they shouldn't be part of this business at this time for some reason. Make a list of the people you'd love to have, people that you wouldn't love to have, hypothetically speaking. And then write down the quality or characteristic of each person that would have you name them. We're going to distill the that down into about five values. Four to six is the ideal number. Not more, not less than that number. Four to six of these values into short phrases, not full sentences, not single words, generally speaking. And we're going to distill down the characteristics designed from those things. Now I said some negative examples, right? So we want to take the negative quality, right? Maybe the person is too like works for big companies, is very kind of by the book. And you're doing this whole like kind of more creative services company at this point. You're going to take that negative characteristic and you're going to describe the reverse of it. I want creative thinkers, right? And that becomes the value. So take some positive, take some negative. The opposite of the negative quality for those people is going to be who you want on your team. And before you know it, you'll have a set of great values that'll actually carry for a long time.
