The best business article I ever read was called "Building Your Company's Vision." The article argued that every great, enduring company had a clearly articulated "Core Ideology" that defined its timeless character.
So I asked myself what our core ideology was, and I came up empty.
I am the third-generation CEO of my family's 87-year-old business, and I want to build a culture of excellence that I can pass on to a fourth generation. So I set out to define our core ideology as a way to start that process.
The entire leadership team spent a year working on our Statement of Purpose and Beliefs. We strove to make it authentic and meaningful. We wanted to provide a road map for personal, professional and ethical conduct for all employees that we could publish to anyone who wanted to read it.
I also believe that building great culture requires the right approach to human resource management. When it came time to build an HR department, I wanted its primary purpose to be ownership of company culture, with ownership of personnel policy to be secondary. So when we recruited our first HR director, we made personality the primary qualification.
There are many cultural cues in our new Statement of Purpose and Beliefs, but my favorite line is related to teamwork: "We believe in a company that takes care of its employees and employees who take care of the company and each other."
To me, that says it all. •