Storytelling Celebrates Fool Culture

Wow! You actually opened a post with the title “core values?” I’m a little surprised. Many people look at “core values” and roll their eyes. After all, most companies have them and they are generally very nice, very aspirational…and very stale.
You can imagine that they were created by a strange consultant with trendy glasses, who smelled like Mountain Dew and Altoids, who came to the office and spent a day in a conference room – or maybe a result of that executive retreat a few years ago where we all heard Alex got a little tipsy and crashed the golf cart.
But, so what? What do they really mean when push comes to shove? How do you use them?
At their worst, Core Values are corporate jargon and a company joke – Enron, after all, had values of respect, integrity, communication, and excellence.
But used in the right way, they can be amazing – dare I say magical! They can allow a company to develop a culture that exists without a lot of oversight.
At The Fool we really do try to live our core values every single day. And they’re a little different than your typical corporate buzz words. Here they are – created by a broad section of Fools from several departments and tenures.
You can see them on the wall as soon as you walk through the front door on our culture tour. But they don’t live there – they live in our culture and in each Fool’s daily actions.
Be Foolish!
Okay, great – but how do you know you are living them? What about the pushing and shoving I mentioned earlier? For me it’s about these four questions, and I ask myself these questions frequently for each value:
In the next couple of posts I’ll answer these questions for each value to give you a greater sense of what they mean and how they simultaneously drive and reflect the culture of The Fool.