Sheen Health Values

As Sheen Health makes progress on its journey, now is a good time for me, as the founder and CEO, to clarify the core values that animate our effort.

Skepticism Turned Into Passion

There was a time that I was skeptical of any “values” discussion. Take the “value wheel” at any company, I used to suggest, and replace it with some other company’s wheel: most employees wouldn’t notice the difference.

Over the years, however, I learned that I was conflating companies’ weak culture with culture itself being irrelevant. This was a significant misunderstanding. As an example, most people have poor diets, yet diet remains extremely important to health.

Don’t conflate weak companies with unimportant values.

The best companies—Amazon, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, Apple—are characterized by a strong culture and clearly-articulated values. These values become tie-breakers in tough discussions, and enable people to say “no.” Over time, they create a team that is united by more than the company’s stock price and benefits programs.

Sheen Health’s Values, and What They Mean to Me

Customer Focus | Intellectual Honesty and Curiosity | Radical Transparency

Customer Focus: Which company is not customer focused? Well, almost all, if you test their behavior. I want Sheen Health to be a company where:

• Every product idea wins or loses based on customer uptake, or lack thereof
• A meaningful component of every employee’s compensation comes from customer NPS (net promoter score)
• Every employee—including the CEO—takes customer calls/chats/texts/e-mail messages

One can imagine the objections to the last behavior. Here are some, with my responses. Is this activity the best use of executives’ time? (Yes, it is.) Shouldn’t we outsource customer service to contractors in low-cost countries? (No.) How will every employee answer questions when we get to hundreds of products? (When that happens, we can easily direct requests, much like we would with an outsourced team.)

Intellectual Honesty and Curiosity: This phrase has a multi-faceted meaning:

• Intellectual honesty is different from honesty. It implies making the argument you believe is true, as opposed to the argument you are passionate about, even though both arguments may be honest. It takes a disciplined person to be intellectual honest. During my strategy consulting days, being surrounded (most of the time) by intellectually honest people was one of the biggest rewards of that line of work.
• Curiosity manifests itself in learning new skills, placing small bets to test hypotheses, and in getting into new markets or solution domains. Amazon is a great example of a “curious” company.
• An interesting result of intellectual honesty and curiosity is that it moves people away from a zero-sum fixed mindset. There are always several ways to win, and everyone on the team can win in different ways.

Radical Transparency: Transparency is also a much-touted quality. Most companies call themselves “transparent” because they hold a regular all-hands meeting and a quarterly business review. The first meeting is full of anodyne bromides, and the attendee list for the latter meeting is tightly controlled. A “radically transparent” company is an outlier:

• Employee compensation: All employees should know one another’s salaries (to the penny), as well as stock/stock option grants, for their entire employment histories. This transparency will create a greater change in people’s behavior than all company culture videos put together.
• Business performance: As long as it is compliant with legal/SEC regulations, all employees should know the company’s sales, backlog, and net income.
• Company strategy and product roadmap: It always amuses me when a company’s strategy and product roadmap are kept secret from employees—the people who are supposed to execute them. Sheen Health will not be one of those companies.

How to Create a Value-Driven Organization

Values get established through repeated behavior.

The early stage of a company is the best and easiest time to set its values—a later change is incredibly difficult. Even at an early stage, values only get established through repeated behavior. My hope is that by making our values and evidence points clear, we will be able to follow them through the ups and downs of the startup journey.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.