Josh Miller: preference

Transcript context

…How did you come up with these? What was the process to come up with company values? Because I know a lot of companies are like, "We should come up with these." How do you do that? The secret is I hate corporate values. I've never resonated with them. And I'm fortunate, we're fortunate enough, to have a lot of really spectacular, experienced leaders in our corner. And I got hammered to the first year, two years on, "Josh, where are your values? How can your team operate without values?" And I always experienced them on the other end as almost corporate propaganda, these cliche fortune cookie, Panda Express-like, "You should care about the detail." It didn't resonate with me. And the thing that clicked was maybe a year and a half, two years into working, I just kept hearing the same things from the team. And I would do things like a year into someone joining, "How's it going? What's going well? What's not?" And I realized that there are some traits that define our team, extremely organically and naturally. No one told people what our values were. Again, because I was this naive, ignorant 31-year-old being like, "Values are a corporate, late-stage capitalism creation," and just very, very hardheaded. And it was really special two years in, hearing from the team why they love The Browser Company, why they think we're doing ... Just the passion there. And then we challenged ourselves to what became a value. Well, if something about the five one-liners on the corporate webpage feels off, start by asking what could be in dream a little bit. And what I realized was, all of the statements people would say about what they loved about The Browser Company, what they thought defined the way we work, they reminded me of how I like to take road trips. I'm a big traveler. I'm a big fan of dropping in somewhere new and just exploring. And so we just had this "Aha!" Moment. Let's, instead of having a corporate landing page with five value titles and subtitles, let's write a manual for how to take a road trip. So we wrote an essay called "Notes on Road Trips" that use this semi-biographical, but mostly fictional, story about a person and their father taking a road trip when they're a teenager, to tell the story of how we do things at The Browser Company. And share these values, but in a way that hopefully won't feel so propagandary and feel a little more, you're reading an essay. So I say that, again, not to say there's anything wrong with traditional values. I'm actually sure I'm going to get an earful for a lot of people that coach me and give me advice that I sounded too indignant on this podcast. But I'm pretty proud of that story because it was a great example of assuming you don't know. We were sure that corporate values were not for us. And then very organically without trying it turned out, "Wait! They run through this company in a pretty profound way. We should put some words around it, because it's happening whether or not we like it, or say it is or not." That's awesome. I have the page here and it's quite beautiful. And, pulling to it in the show notes just very briefly and tactically, did you just sit down and start writing this thing and then people gave you feedback? How long did this process take? Just for folks that maybe you want to go down this road?…

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