Eating My Own Dog Food - Building Core Values for NewCo - Part 1
Darius Mirshahzadeh
Disrupting Private Equity in the RIA Space | Serial Entrepreneur | Core Value Evangelist | Top 10 Apple Business Podcast in America 3.0M+ Downloads | Best Selling Author
I am onto the next part of my journey now. I have recently began to take on ultra high growth CEO's, companies and their leadership teams as clients. So far I have 10 clients and may take on 1 or 2 more. As a CEO, I have always been obsessed with high growth, scale, integral leadership development, and maximizing value creation. I believe this happens through the convergence of building assets for scale: Cultural, Strategic and Execution Assets to be exact. When architected properly, I have found that organizations grow organically with less friction and create more value. It has been an interesting couple of months as I embark on this new chapter. As part of this new journey I am building the core values of the new business (have not named the business yet). I believe that core values are the foundation for scale and are the most important thing to get right in the business when looking to scale. I have decided to share with you all the process I use to build core values and will be posting as I make progress.
In my book, The Core Value Equation, I always start off with doing an exercise, called the Core Value Worksheet. I start with 105 core value words, ideas, and then narrow it down to the top 15 core value themes in order of priority. I caution that the top themes are not the final values by a long shot as I mention in my book. They are there to help organize my feelings and ideas about what are the fundamental beliefs of the organization. Here is where I have landed so far:
The Top 5 are the most important, these are the 5 core value themes I will be working from to shape the final values.
1.Courageous
2.Excellence
3.Passionate
4.Community
5.Mindfulness
Core Values 6 through 15 are what I call sub-themes, they are there to provide context into how I bring the core values 1-5 alive.
6.Engaged
7.Loyal
8.Creative
9.Curious
10.Pragmatic (Simplify)
11.Generous
12.Fun-loving
13.Driven
14.Confident
15.Service-oriented
I will be sharing this process with you all so you can see step by step on how I believe a person or organization should discover, design and build core values that are built for high utility value and scale. Next up will be bucketing the sub themes...stay tuned!