⚡️ TL;DR;
Values:
Be madly resilient
Always learn & grow
Be authentic to yourself and others
Obsess with customer-value
Principles:
Charity
Diversity
Ecology
Mentoring/ Personal development
🎈Values
🍯 Be madly resilient
This video sums it up pretty well: watch the honey badger video
"Honey badger doesn't give a shit"
"It's getting stung by like a thousand bees but it doesn't care. It's just hungry"
“It is the most fearless animal in all of the animal kingdom,” unfazed by other larger animals that it may come up against. "It turns out there’s a reason the honey badger has few natural predators, namely its thick skin"
Resources to check:
The dip
The “belly of the whale” experience
Movies & books:
Eddie The Eagle
I can't make this up by Kevin Hart
Rocky
What this means concretely at work
Being a honey badger means that we:
accept that being uncomfortable is inevitably part of being on the path of doing great things (🚨 this is NOT about working long hours to feel important or showing others that we're more committed).
don't complain when things don't go the way we'd like them to go. We either (1) fix the situation, (2) ask for help or (3) accept what is and work on what we have control on.
try hard things even if we're afraid to fail. Being afraid is fine and great. But it does not prevent us from putting a step forward.
don't care about norms and what others think or do. We do what we need to do to get the honey. We don't look pretty. We focus on getting results. Results is what's pretty.
Stories
Paul likes the dip. As soon as he is about to get out of one, he just raises the bar higher. For example, Paul has been biking long rides for a while (centuries). Then he moved to running ultra-marathons. Why??!! Because he's hungry!
Ask Francis about his surfing addiction? He would get into the cold Pacific ocean at 5am when the waves are at their best (and the sharks are hunting).
Sam moved to the US to join a tiny company with 3 kids and 1 on the way. His bank account would go down for the first 6 months on the job before it gets back to positive.
We’re not a fit [Not a judgement]
for people looking for the easy wins and who are not ready for the heavy seas.
for people who talk and dream but don't put the effort to get what they want.
📚 Always learn & grow
Being a life learner means that you're always hungry for knowledge, curious about what's behind the hill, always looking for improving yourself and helping other people do so.
Coming out of a journey without being a better person is not success. The learning is a big part of the reward.
What this means concretely at work
We help yourself become better at what you do. We're always looking for ways to improve. We're striving for excellence.
We receive bad feedback well and give constructive feedback.
Make time for deliberate practice. We optimize for rate of learning.
We invest in people. We help others become better.
We give ourselves and others the opportunity to fail.
We look at the long term people potential. We give ourselves the time to recharge and find meaning.
Stories
Paul read 103 books last year.
Most of us have coaches to point to our blindspots and challenge us to improve.
We share our personal improvement goals. For example, check the 1h section of our standup.
Resources to check
Receiving and giving feedback well
Ray Dalio's principles
We’re not a fit [Not a judgement]
for the folks ready to sacrifice the journey for the destination. For example, making quick money even if it means doing a mindless job for it.
🤝 Be authentic to yourself and others
Being authentic means that we're true to who we are. We don't have to wear a mask at work and we don't expect others to wear one so they can fit in.
What this means concretely at work
We call bullshit on other people and most importantly, our own internal lies. We're deliberate about what we're trying to achieve. We're ok with sometimes going for a selfish goal as long as we acknowledge it.
We default to transparency. We do our best to share our thinking as it is, even though this might make a discussion uncomfortable.
We hate politics and playing people games.
We accept ourselves and others the way they are.
We show "confident vulnerability".
If we want to see a change, we voice it.
Resources to check
Stories
We've been working from a garage (literally) for nearly 2 years. We welcomed investors and prospects there.
The "magic banana" story.
We’re not a fit [Not a judgement]
People who like to please rather than speak their mind
People who enjoy playing and sorting out political games
📈 Obsess with customer-value
Being obsessed with customer-value means that the purpose and pride in our work is to help customers.
What this means concretely at work
Customer value is our north star.
In other words, we evaluate the quality of our work in terms of customer impact. It is not about how many hours we've put in. It is not about how advanced our solution is. It is not about how happy our customers are. The quality of our work is measured by the value our work creates for our customers.
Stories
Francis has always fought back against using NPS to measure the success of customer teams. It is not that NPS is a bad thing. It is that it is not enough. We're not here to make customer happy. We're here to make them successful. To take a bad analogy: it's like saying that the goal of a parent is not to make their kids love them. It is about helping kids build the character and the skillset that will allow them to be good and happy humans. One does not prevent the other but one is selfish, the other generous.