Company Culture at Mobilization Labs
June 18th, 2010 by John Cason
My name is John and I am the newest member of the sales team. I started less than one week ago on June 11, 2010. My first day we had a company wide meeting to talk about our core values. Caleb Clark, Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Mobilization Labs, led the discussion of “where are we” and “what do we want to be.” He asked the employees to be thinking about the core values of the company. Mobilization Labs is a strong Atlanta start-up, but the company is already concerned about maintaining its company culture.
Many people are familiar with Zappos.com. They are the largest online shoe store. While many people love their store and shopping experience, Zappos is somewhat of a poster child in the world of entrepreneurship and small businesses. In 1999 Zappos had little sales revenue. In 2009 they grossed over $1 Billion in sales and sold their company to Amazon. Their company culture is what business leaders and entrepreneurs admire more than sales growth.
Zappos placed a high value on their corporate culture. Annually they published a “Culture Book” of employee contributions describing what the company meant to them. One core value was to “Deliver WOW Through Service.” They say on their website that “At Zappos, Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing With WOW.” They believe you should WOW customers, co workers, vendors, partners, and investors (in the long term). For a full list of their core values, go to their website.
At Mobilization Labs, all new employees are asked to read Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard. We do things differently. We’re encouraged to have fun, enjoy our work, and serve customers using our software. We’re at a point in our company history where we want to define our core values – what matters to us. Every engineer, marketing and sales employee, and executive member is reading Habitudes by Dr. Tim Elmore. Habitudes is a short book of illustrations with a few pages of thoughts. The idea is based on the notion that an image is worth a thousand words… images stick… images illustrate. Dr. Elmore uses illustrations to teach lessons about leadership. He has four Habitude books. The first book, the one we are reading at Mobilization Labs, is focused on the art of self-leadership. At Mobilization Labs, we believe we need to lead ourselves before we can lead others. The second book is The Art of Connecting with Others, third is The Art of Leading Others and fourth is the Art of Changing Culture.
Our first lesson/image was “The Iceberg.” The idea is that the iceberg can represent our individual leadership. The 10% of ice above the water is our skill level while the remaining 90% below the water is our character. The lesson struck good debate within the team on topics from self discipline, values, things influencing us inside and outside our lives, and the source of our own personal security. It was good a launching board into the deep water of defining and identifying our culture.
Next week we will be reading "The Starving Baker" lesson.
We will continue to update our followers on our progress in defining our culture. It is an exciting time at Mobilization Labs when the employees have a vested interest in defining who we are. We believe if we can create a great culture we will be able to better serve our clients that are using the Wildfire Platform to mobilize their supporters.
