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Twilio's Nine Values

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67 pointssunils3415 comments

Twilio is a company that impresses me.

These value statement things, though, don't; in fact, I associate them with the opposite kinds of companies as Twilio.

I'm prepared to learn that this is irrational. Has anyone here worked at a company where the team was improved by a formal statement of values?

I always thought, if we were going to have a list of values, it'd be constrained to values that were head-scratching tradeoffs. "Time to market > quality", or things like that. Which of these values express competition between ideals? What company wouldn't have a "no shenanigans" value? I might be more fascinated by one that had (and justified) a "shenanigans always!" value.

Reminds me of Stewart Lee's standup bit on "the values of the Carphone Warehouse" (a British mobile phone retailer):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwH1fLEMDkY

Thanks for posting this. Seriously funny.

Yeah 1 or 2 values make sense, 9 do not. Twilio appears to have more values than Apple has products.

I'm not sure about a small company, but a couple of years back we did an organization-wide values exercise at Engineers Without Borders Canada. As a highly distributed organization with chapters across the country and staff across Africa as well, having a stated set of values that resonated extremely well with me and many other members and staff was very useful. It's a great foundation to build upon especially as the organization continues to grow.

You can check them out here: http://wiki.ewb.ca/en/EWBs_Values_and_Beliefs

Thomas, have you seen Netflix' memo about their values and corporate culture? I think it does fit in your description.

Since I'm not an insider I have no opinion on whether their team is improved by it, but I believe it does the job of attracting people they want to work with and filtering out people they don't want.

37signals got its name from 37 ideas they had about how a company should be.

http://37signals.com/00.html

If you actually read this, you'll quickly see that it is not a list of 37 "values", but rather a clever way of structuring the company's "about" page; for instance, "08" is a list of their clients.

No that's not actually true. That link was just the first from here: http://37signals.com/manifesto And #8 is meant to demonstrate that they have very large and important clients, proving their "experience", which is the title of that section.

Having worked at Twilio, I think these mean a lot more to people on the inside than they do to people on the outside. They're not something the company is trying to be, they document the way the company really is and by writing them down its like saying: hey we made it this way on purpose, let's not forget. For me, these have a lot of personal meaning that couldn't ever fit on the page.

Anyone else remember that 37signals started out with a homepage a bit like this back in the late 90s? Actually, just found they still keep an archive of it: http://37signals.com/manifesto

nice find.

I truly do not understand the value of "Corporate Core Value" statements. (OK, #5, "No Shenanigans", those are words to live by.)

Personal, Human core values. The things that keep us in line, help us to foster healthy relationships, and build civilizations are important.

But what are corporate "core values"?

I'm always a little unnerved when a company (spontaneously, or even worse, with the guidance of a "guru") feels the need to embrace this particular brand of corporate banality.

It's advertisement wrapped in altruism, and that's in vogue right now. While I'm sure it's well-intentioned, and I don't mean this as an indictment, it feels cynical.

Whatever happened to Mission Statements?

http://i.imgur.com/pvEkp.jpg

Core values, mission statements, slogans - these are just different sides of the bad dice most companies play with. Companies that create these expressions of business communication - almost all of them? - as a result of going through the motions of running a business without any evidence for the creation of these expressions. Seriously, when was the last time you read a company's mission statement? When was the last time you thought a mission statement was anything but a bland and generic sound bite disconnected from reality?

I would love to see a company with enough integrity, honesty and confidence that they wouldn't even bother with any of these things.

Mission statements tend to lock you in a lot more than you'd desire (if you stay true to them). Organizations change. Missions can change. Core values tend to stay the same. You can write the values of an organization on the whiteboard at a board meeting, and every decision should be able to be made within them. When this works, it's really cool.

To be fair, this is coming from a not-for-profit mindset.

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