Cameron Herold argues that company culture is built deliberately starting with a vivid, concrete 3-year vision he calls a "painted picture." He contrasts this with bland mission/vision statements and prescribes a 3–4 page, sensory-rich document describing operations, customers, employees, and leadership three years out, plus rituals for sharing it (retreats, meeting readings, laminated copies), tracking progress quarterly with a three-color highlight system, and celebrating milestones to align decision-making across the organization.
Chapters
Hi, my name is Cameron Herold. I'm the author of a book called Double Double and I coach CEOs around the world on growing amazing companies and growing fast growth organizations. What I want to talk to you about today was culture. Culture inside of a company is really by design and the systems that you need to build culture are the ones that I talk to yprs all over the world on. It really starts first off with vision, and not vision by what we're taught in school, not with the classic mission statement or vision statement of, you know, mashing up a bunch of your favorite words. Vision is really taking the vision that you see of the company maybe three years into the future and describing in vivid detail what your entire company looks and feels like. Describing operations and IT and finance and leadership, describing what your customers are saying, what your employees are saying, describing in vivid detail what the entire company looks and feels like three years in the future and writing it down in a three or four page document so everyone can see and feel what you can see. If all of your employees and all of your customers and all of your suppliers can see exactly what you can see. If they can see what the company looks like and acts like in that finished day, three years out, then you have a chance at actually making that come true. Much like a homeowner would be able to describe a finished renovation and then get people to take the plans or the blueprints and make your vision come true. That's why it's so important to draft what I call a painted picture and write down in vivid detail what your company looks like in the future. So the rest of the team could put the strategic plan in place and then have the meeting rhythms and people to support making that happen. So you want to write down in a three or four page document what you see your company looking like three years in the future. If you're doing this, you've got to get out of the box. You can't sit in your office and write this. You've got to go somewhere where you're inspired. Go sit out in a park or in the mountains or the lake. Go to your cottage, lie in your backyard, take a notepad and turn it in landscape mode and write down in vivid detail as much of what you can see and then write it up in a rough paragraph form. Then you can take your rough notes and have a writer make it really jump off the page. The writer can take the written word and really make it visceral and really make it exciting so that people will actually be able to execute on what you can see. You might add some graphic design elements to really make it pop off the pa. Then what you're doing is taking your vision document or this painted picture, and you're sharing it with the world. You're actually giving it to all of your customers, all your potential customers. You're giving it to every employee, every potential employee. You're giving it to your suppliers, your lawyer, your doctor, your spouses. So everyone in the organization is completely aligned. At the beginning of every annual retreat or every quarterly retreat, you have all of your employees read the painted picture in detail so they're literally thinking about the future. And then you start the retreat on working on putting the plans in place to execute on today. At the beginning of every meeting in your company, have any of the employees at the meeting read one paragraph from your painted picture. In fact, keep a laminated copy of your painted picture on all of your boardroom tables and all meeting room tables so that people in your company are always again, thinking of what that future looks like. Don't be afraid that your competitors are going to get ahold of this, because it's not the plan. It doesn't show them how you're going to make it happen. It just shows them where you're going. By getting everyone completely aligned with where you're going, they're going to be able to make decisions based on that intuition that you feel you might have as a CEO, but now everyone in your organization, organization has that same leadership intuition that you have. The painted picture acts as a guiding document. It acts as a way for people to make decisions. It acts as a filter for what projects you're going to be putting in place day to day and over the next month and next quarter. So when you're in the planning process, people will be able to say, you know, this project is going to make these couple of sentences come true. Last thing that I do with the painted picture is every quarter, I take the written document, maybe in a word document, and I highlight the sentences in one of three colors. I either leave it black if we haven't started it, or I color code it in yellow, meaning it's been started, or I color it in green, meaning it's been completed. And that way, every quarter, every employee can see that the painted picture is starting to come to fruition. We're starting on some of the sentences. Some of the sentences are coming true. And then the last aspect of that is making sure that you celebrate each of the successes along the way so that people can really see and feel this painted picture happening. Your painted picture should only be three years out. Don't go out five years, don't go out 10 years. Three years is far enough to inspire, and only going one year out isn't really enough to get people excited. So I'd really challenge you to lean out into the future. Describe what you can see, and describe it in a way that everyone in your organization and everyone coming in touch with your organization will have that same visual picture of what they're supposed to be building as well. Thanks very much.
