Care and Kick Butt!!!!

Like a lot of you I have been through my share of companies each with their own corporate values. All of them sounded good on paper. Heck, they are designed to sound good!!

But here is what I found the problem with them is:

• Values are only meaningful if they are lived every day, if they are put into tangible action by the management team down day in and day out.
• As I get older I have a hard time with long list of things (where long is 5) and the product manager in me reminds me that having short and sweet priorities is paramount

So, after years of working in, leading, studying teams and organizations, I think that if I had a company on my own again I would boil the company values down to two. Ready? Here they go:

• Care
• Kick Butt

<—- emendament Gordon makes a good point in the comment below, so I am revising this already to 3 points:

• Be Honest
• Care
• Kick Butt

‘cos if you are not honest you may care about the wrong things and kick butt in the wrong direction

—->

Wherever you see excellence, you see people who care and kick butt. They care about their customers, the product they build, their colleagues, their families, their communities… and they kick butt, ‘cos if we just care but we don’ act on it… well we are just useless nice and caring people

Just a clarification: this does not mean that I am leaving or even considering leaving VMware. I love this place and I am here for the long run. It just hit me that these would be good, concise values for a company.

Vittorio