A short talk by Jim Johnson about the importance of defining guiding principles when building a business. He argues that principles should center on customer experience and treating employees well, warning that selfish, profit-only principles can produce short-term success but cause long-term problems.
What kind of business are you going to be? These guiding principles, we have to ask ourselves, what are we all about? Because if we don't know what we're all about, the thing that we build might be built on a weak foundation that is focused solely on achieving a goal or making money or buying a boat or all this stuff that we tend to see that happens out there that isn't focused on what the actual customer experience is going to be like, what it's going to be like to work for you. And so you've got to really ask yourself, what are your guiding principles? And think that you're building this business based off of that foundation. And I'll give an example. Whenever I first started in business, the guiding principle that I had was, let's see how much money I can make and how big I can build this thing. Those were my guiding principles. Each person that worked for me was a dollar sign. And if you produced, you could stay. If you didn't, you got to go. So my guiding principles were what I would call pretty selfish, narcissistic, and those type of things. And don't get me wrong, it works. It works really, really well. We did awesome for a little while, but those guiding principles came back to bite me, because I wasn't about the other people. I was being selfish instead of selfless.
