Not having these values could mean competitive disadvantages for your business
Introduction: Do values really matter for business and personal success? In tribute to Tony Hsieh (who recently passed), he and his company Zappos were a living example of an astounding YES to this question. Based on my own life experiences, the role models and mentors I learned from, the books I have read, and my observations of many people’s and business’ successes and failures, my answer is also a YES to this question.
In the face of economics, it might be difficult to hold on to your values. As a tech founder or co-founder, could you afford to lose your values? My advice: stay true to your values.
If you agree, you may still wonder “what values should I hold on to?” In this article, I will share with you 4 fundamental core values which I believe are timeless and will outlive the current product you are creating.
Like many who came before me and many who will come after me, I was at a fork road in my life. I consciously took a step back to re-evaluate my situation and my path forward. As part of that meditation, I decided to analyze my values. I thought long and hard about what values resonated with me the most. In the end, I came up with 4 fundamental core values. They are the bedrock of who I am.
1. Integrity: Do what is right and be honest. Put the best interest of our customers in front of our own. Don’t break a promise even if it means we suffer a loss.
Integrity is the most important value for me for several reasons. 1. It’s how my parents have raised me. 2. It’s what my teachers and mentors have taught me. 3. It’s what my role models have said. 4. In my own personal life experience, I stuck to integrity each time I was faced with tough situations and then things worked out for the better.
Warren Buffett: “We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you.”
Liu Bei (Three Kingdoms): “A person without credibility cannot stand (in this world).”
Doing the right thing makes you happier and sleep soundly at night. That alone makes you a more effective leader. Once you earn a reputation of strong integrity, existing customers will help you grow through word of mouth and new customers will spend less time doubting you before making purchases. Your team will revere in your leadership and start to truly believe in your vision.
The competitive advantage of integrity is often more visible when there is a decline or lack of it. It may seem convenient to get one more sale or one more customer by making a bogus claim or a promise you don’t intend to keep. It may help you make the number for the week, the month, or the quarter. However, losing integrity has huge consequences. It breaks your customers’ trust in you. It demotivates your employees who have integrity. No one wants to work with someone who doesn’t keep their word or at least try their best to. Once that trust is broken, your business is done. Trust is earned in drops over time, but can be lost in buckets overnight.
2. Excellence: Deliver happiness. Demand top quality user experience. Do not skip steps. Do things properly the first time and every time. Keep improving.
By providing excellent products and service to others, we are delivering happiness. When other people value such happiness, we would do great as a person and as a business. The value of excellence comes very natural to me. Since a very young age, I learned that I got more praises and had more time to play when I did my homework right the first time. Excellence really is a habit. Skipping steps and cutting corners may seem okay at first but can cause real headaches and cost a lot more to fix down the road. Going above and beyond gives you a great sense of achievement and elevates the experience your customers see. Excellence will also help you attract top talent to help you grow.
Excellence has a cost. Once you commit yourself to excellence, you have to keep improving. It will keep you on your toes. However, I must say that once it becomes a habit, it’s not much more work than the work you would have to do if you were mediocre because you would spend much less time firefighting or dealing with a mess. The value that your customers see in your excellent products or services will often pay for that additional cost many times over.
The bigger hidden cost of excellence is opportunity cost. As founders, we must look at the big picture and think about what really matters to the customers and need to be excellent. As the start-up stage, you shouldn’t try to make every aspect of your business perfect, because your team simply won’t have enough time. Their time would be better spent focusing on the top priorities. The opportunity cost of adding or perfecting a feature that a customer doesn’t care about is tremendous.
3. Empathy: Care for each other. Experience situations from others’ perspective and offer help whenever and wherever we can. Have an open mind and do not jump to conclusions.
This value is hard to come by. Its sibling is patience. I was fortunate enough to have gone through some unfortunate events in life and came out okay. Those events made me more resilient, more grateful and more empathetic. And my kids improve my patience every day. :)
Those who have empathy may take longer to get things done, but they will do surprisingly well. Those who can really put themselves in their customers’ shoes will have a much better understanding of the problems and pains they are trying to solve. An open mind sees opportunities where a closed mind sees none. Deep connections with your team will also help everyone get through tough times such as this pandemic. When you are surrounded by great people with a shared purpose and meaning, you would work much better and happier towards the common goal.
Competitive advantages aside, empathy also gives you an amazing ability to see the big picture, i.e. who are you doing all this hard work for anyway? While science and technology answer the question of how, please don’t discount the importance of social sciences as they answer the question of why. I dare all fellow tech founders to think about their net impact on people’s livelihood. Who exactly did your brilliant ideas help? Were they the ones who were already privileged or the ones who had been less fortunate in life? What is the point of a great piece of technology if it ends up in the wrong hands and negatively affects human progress? I don’t have all the answers for these tough questions, but I hope you get my point about the importance of empathy.
4. Efficiency: Find the most efficient ways of accomplishing the same results without sacrificing Integrity, Excellence, and Empathy. Do not waste time, money, or other resources
Efficiency is a natural tendency found not just in humans but all over the biological kingdoms. The desire for efficiency is as instinctive as your need for a TV remote. We hate wasting energy, time or other resources. For me, it also means a minimalistic attitude towards materialism, consume less, conserve, and do more with less. It has become very much part of myself because of my upbringing and professional training.
Many of existing technologies today deliver efficiency as the core value. They reduce costs. For example, Google reduces your search costs, emails and chat services reduce the cost of messages, shopping online reduces the time spent driving and parking. AI and robots reduce human labour costs.
The efficiency-driven technologies could be used to benefit humanity as a whole, but sadly they sometimes create monopolies that become too powerful to the detriment of the common people. When a new technology saves human labour costs, the existing workers are often left behind to fend for themselves. This often places an enormous burden on the society and the government. Thus, the real question is: was the distribution of benefits created from this new technology fair?
This is why I added a caveat to this last value, as it is often at odds with one or more of the first 3 values. When there are conflicts between the values, we need to take a balanced approach and I recommend leaning more towards the first 3 values than efficiency. However, it is really an art to achieve that fine balance, because when faced with competition in a fierce marketplace, a less efficient company may not be able to survive.
Conclusion: There you have it, 4 fundamental values. For easy reference, they make a simple acronym “IEEE”. In my opinion, you cannot afford to lose sight of any of them as a tech founder. On the other hand, you will be much happier if you have them in a good balance.
Do these values resonate with you? Do you see these fundamental values embodied in the values of your organization? Please comment below or message me directly to share your thoughts.
