Companies usually start with an idea – a product or service that someone wants to build or provide.

The people building the company decide what they are going to do before they decide who they are going to be.

But what if we flip that?

What if the who comes before the what?

It is possible to decide what your company values, how it will treat its employees, how it will treat the environment, and how it will treat its customers even before you know what you are going to sell or make or provide.

In fact, I would guess that the longer you wait to answer the who and how questions, the more likely you are to build a company in which employees are unhappy and disengaged, and that eventually fails (or at minimum doesn’t reach it’s full potential).