Company Culture Through the Clear Eyes of a Child

There are times during your career when you feel the need take a step back and assess what you’ve built and what you’ve accomplished and whether it was all (or mostly) good and right. With everything involved in creating, building, and evolving a business there are plenty of opportunities for things to go awry. Recently, a lot of conversations about company culture have me thinking a lot about our team and each individual team member.

Leave it to a child to bring clarity.

A co-worker’s seven year-old daughter came to the office last week and asked her mother why there was a Cadence sign on the door. Her mother replied, “Remember we told you that Cadence bought Pointwise. So it isn’t Pointwise anymore, it’s Cadence.”

The young lady was incredulous. “What?! So they just took over Pointwise?! I’m going to beat them up because I loved Pointwise!”

Her mother asked what she loved about Pointwise and was told “All of Papi’s friends are there. Especially the one who loves kids.”

When a kid loves your company because it represents her father’s friends, it means your culture has succeeded. It means that Pointwise isn’t a name on a door - it’s a state of mind, a way of working, a circle of friends. It’s people who are genuine and enthusiastic and committed to each other and the mission of Working with Great People to Enable Innovation.

There’s an especially relevant quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson that applies here. “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”

This company culture is actually something that each of us lives daily regardless of what the sign on the door says. It means that we continue to live our core values of Commitment to Excellence, Attention to Detail, Taking Initiative, Collaborating, and Having FUN. It means that we can share all of that with whomever we encounter on our professional journeys.

And a big part of FUN is keeping a supply of toys and games for when coworkers bring their kids to work so your office can be the unofficial daycare center.

P.S. To my new Cadence friends, please forgive her threat of violence. She hasn’t met you yet.