Bonfire Book Club — Beyond Entrepreneurship
Beyond Entrepreneurship: Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company by James Collins and William C. Lazier
We knew we wanted to define our company values as early as possible, but we spent a lot of time going back and forth about what exactly makes a mission statement, and how is it different than a purpose…and how do you even decide on either one? We went to other companies to find examples, but they are all over the place — there’s no universal definition, and no perfect example. We needed some guidance on where to start, and how to get there.
There are a number of books that help young companies sort through these questions, but we chose the process laid out in Beyond Entrepreneurship. It had specific definitions for general terms like Vision, Strategy, and Tactics, solid ideas about what they should be, and detailed frameworks for how to define them.
Vision Framework
The vision provides context for decision making, and creates the basis for teamwork and community. Beyond Entrepreneurship helped us define our vision by breaking it down into the following components:
Purpose
- The fundamental reason for the organization’s existence
- Like a guiding star; always worked towards, but never fully attained
Mission
- A bold, compelling, audacious goal
- Has a clear finish line and a specific time-frame. Once completed, a new mission is set
Core Values and Beliefs
- A system of guiding principles and tenets; a philosophy of business and life
Taking a number of the book’s examples as inspiration, we started on our core values during Bonfire’s first offsite in Joshua Tree. We wrote our personal values and aspirations for Bonfire on post-its in a rapid-fire brainstorm. We ended up with hundreds of yellow squares on the sliding glass doors, and once we organized them into categories we realized there was a lot of overlap. This was the beginning of our journey to define what would become our seven core values, that then informed our purpose and our mission.
We’re not yet ready to share everything we created. Partly it’s because, as Collings and Lazier say, you’ve got to be a role model of the culture you want to create. We need to live our truth before we sit around and brag about it. It’s also because, like everything at Bonfire, our values, mission, and purpose are iterative. Our flexibility is our strength, and we are always open to better ideas.
The mission, purpose, and values are just one thing we took from Beyond Entrepreneurship. We also got value and insight from the discussions of effective leadership styles and decentralized decision making frameworks. This book had a lot to offer Bonfire as we got up and running, and it’s an essential book for understanding what Bonfire is today.
Read more from Bonfire’s Book Club:
Ilkka Paananen’s BAFTA Talk
Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen talks about champagne toasts, small teams, and company culture in a BAFTA lecture. We are inspired by the philosophy of staying small, and how turning the traditional org chart upside-down gives teams the power to serve the players.
Radical Candor
The cold, hard, scary truth is actually a good thing, as long as it is delivered with genuine care and kindness. While it might be easier to sugar coat everything — in the long run it doesn’t help anyone grow and improve.
