The Core Value Equation: Building Culture That Scales | Darius Mirshahzadeh, Revisited

Summary

Podcast Summary: Work For Humans

Episode Title: The Core Value Equation: Building Culture That Scales | Darius Mirshahzadeh, Revisited
Host: Dart Lindsley
Guest: Darius Mirshahzadeh
Date: August 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores how authentic core values drive scalable, thriving company cultures. Guest Darius Mirshahzadeh—former CEO of one of the fastest-growing companies in the US and author of The Core Value Equation—shares how he transformed a toxic workplace into a values-driven organization. He and host Dart Lindsley unpack practical strategies for designing, activating, and measuring cultural values so that work becomes meaningful, polarizing (in the right way), and self-sustaining.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Painful Moment of Realization and Taking Ownership

[02:54 - 07:03]

• Darius describes scaling his first business rapidly, only to realize he hated the toxic culture he’d created.
• Pivotal moment: A staff member dismissively tells him, "Not my job," prompting Darius to reflect, “Fucking hate this company. And it’s my fault.”
• Quote:

  “Nobody else designed the culture that created this outcome. I did. ...Whose fault could it be but mine? ...I need to fix this.” — Darius Mirshahzadeh [06:13]

2. Early Efforts and Learning What Doesn’t Work

[07:10 - 10:43]

• Initially turned to superficial markers (T-shirts, posters) after MIT’s Birthing of Giants program on scaling businesses.
• Realizes those tactics didn’t truly embed values into organizational DNA.

3. The Difficulty and Necessity of Living Core Values

[10:43 - 15:50]

• Most companies settle for “checkbox” approaches to values—listing them, then ignoring them.
• A group exercise revealed that almost no leaders (including Darius himself) could recite their company’s values from memory.
• Quote:

  “How can your values be alive and well in your business if you don’t even know ’em?” — Darius Mirshahzadeh [12:22]

• Darius redefines and distills his values into memorable phrases (e.g., "Do Work," "Wow Everyone") and witnesses immediate improvement.

4. Designing (Not Declaring) Values

[15:50 - 21:41]

• Values must be designed for memorability, viral spread, and durability—not generic “brochure language.”
• Values are part of the unique "language" and tone of an organization.
• Quote:

  “Good design makes the world go round. ...If you want to have a great culture, you have to design for it.” — Darius [16:00]

5. Who Should Design Values, and Why They Should Polarize

[21:41 - 23:32]

• Only those embodying the company’s authentic personality should be involved—regardless of role.
• Well-designed core values should attract some and repel others, ensuring alignment and reducing retention of misfits.
• Quote:

  “Core values don’t need to be nice. ...You want to attract people that resonate with this both inside and outside your organization.” — Darius [22:19]

6. “Invisible Scale”: How Values Govern Action

[23:32 - 27:08]

• When core values are deeply embedded, they act as an “invisible manager,” driving trust and accountability.
• Misaligned individuals self-select out, while those aligned synergize productively.
• Quote:

  “It’s the core values that holds people accountable to the standard.” — Darius [24:15]

7. Dealing with Toxic Top Performers

[27:08 - 29:38]

• It’s challenging but necessary to part ways with high performers who don’t live company values; failing to do so silently erodes culture.
• Pragmatically, Darius has sometimes delayed action, but always paid a price in organizational trust and morale.

8. Core Values as the “User Interface” for Employees

[29:38 - 33:19]

• Core values shape employee experience by providing clarity and continuity, especially as organizations scale.
• Darius required all new employees to participate in a three-hour values onboarding, fostering a shared language.
• Quote:

  “I overheard them talking in core value language. ...the core values had become the language of the organization.” — Darius [31:59]

9. Making Values Sticky, Viral, and Practical

[33:19 - 35:24]

• Every policy, procedure, and internal documentation are written in the language of the values, reinforcing their importance.
• Militant enforcement and clear standards foster belonging and engagement.
• Example Core Values at The Money Source:
  • People Matter (caring)
  • Inspiring Leadership
  • Strength of Character (integrity)
  • Rock Solid Service

10. Measuring and Sustaining Culture

[35:24 - 39:48]

• Use tools like eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) and Gallup Q12 to continually measure employee engagement and cultural health.
• Culture/morale is fragile and needs constant, conscious attention—easy to both improve and damage.

11. Core Values as a “Third Thing”

[39:48 - 41:26]

• Core values can be treated as a “third thing” in the organization—something everyone is responsible for cultivating and repairing together.

12. Values and Identity: Selection, Not Transformation

[41:26 - 45:07]

• Employees should naturally resonate with company values; values don’t transform people so much as select those who are already aligned.
• This alignment leads to high engagement, referrals, and even intra-company marriages.
• Quote:

  “Core values have to have two jobs. One is to attract those that resonate and the second is to detract those that don’t.” — Darius [44:33]

13. Tribalism, Kindred Spirits, and Humane Hiring

[45:07 - 48:29]

• Shared values foster community (“finding your tribe”) and create a magnetic workplace.
• Humane hiring: Careful alignment prevents the pain of firing and ensures employees can thrive.

14. The Power of Real Experience and Values as Decision-Making Tool

[48:53 - 52:30]

• Darius wrote his book as a collection of lived, hard-fought lessons, not as a theorist.
• When facing tough decisions, consult the values for clarity—often the answer is obvious (though not always easy).
• Quote:

  “Your core value is the ultimate decision making engine that you have in your life when you design them to do that.” — Darius [51:49]

15. The Pink Unicorn: Mascots and Cultural Symbolism

[52:30 - 56:29]

• Origin of the Pink Unicorn mascot: A playful, symbolic “North Star” representing happiness and distinctiveness in a dull industry.
• Tying together mission (“Grow Happiness”), values, and symbolism for organizational cohesion.

16. Evolution, Calling, and Personal Growth

[56:29 - 60:12]

• Darius’ perspective on work shifted from ego, achievement, and “being a star” to work as a vessel for personal calling and balanced fulfillment (part CEO, part artist).
• Quote:

  “If I’m not feeding those two elements of my soul...I get really grumpy, like, really unhappy.” — Darius [59:30]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On values as organizational DNA:

  “Companies don’t have values. People have core values. ...Your company is a conglomerate of multiple people’s values.” — Darius [10:55]

• On weaponizing values:

  “They need to be designed so the team can’t weaponize them against you...” — Darius [20:59]

• On engagement and loyalty:

  “You want someone to give you loyalty? You’ve got to give them loyalty first.” — Darius [35:57]

• On mistakes informing wisdom:

  “The book was written because I wish someone had given me the book 10 years earlier.” — Darius [48:53]

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Example Timestamps for Key Segments

• Company Culture Breaking Point: [02:54 – 07:03]
• Why "Corporate Values" Often Fail: [10:43 – 15:50]
• Designing for Virality & Longevity: [16:00 – 21:41]
• Invisible Scale—How Values Govern Companies: [23:32 – 27:08]
• Handling Top Performers Who Break Values: [27:08 – 29:38]
• Embedding Values in Processes & Language: [33:19 – 35:24]
• Measuring Engagement: [35:24 – 39:48]
• Pink Unicorn Origin Story: [52:30 – 56:29]
• Evolving Role of Work in Life: [56:29 – 60:12]

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Conclusion

Darius Mirshahzadeh’s journey illustrates that authentic, intentionally designed core values don’t just define a company—they make it scale by attracting (and repelling) the right people. Culture isn’t an HR exercise or a set of safe platitudes—it’s a living code embedded in language, process, and action. When leaders take ownership and treat values as strategic assets, they build organizations where work is fulfilling, engaging, and meaningful for all.

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You can learn more about Darius at therealdarius.com or tune in to his podcast, The Greatness Machine.

Transcript

[A]

Listen, have you ever been a part of a winning team before? Did you have to double check each other's work? Did you have to make sure someone worked hard? Of course not. None of that. The reason for that was that it was a room filled with shared values and you guys trusted each other and you trusted each other's ability and competency to get stuff done. When we do a good job of making the core values come to life and hold people accountable to them, you have this invisible manager that shows up. It's the core values that holds people accountable to the standard. The stronger that gets, the harder it is for people that don't believe that to show up. They opt out quick because they're like, whoa, this is not me. It's very polarizing. And over time, what ends up happening is we create what's called a culture of aligned values.

[B]

Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. I often refer back to this episode because in it Darius Meshasadeh changed my mind about who owns the values of a company. Lots of people dream about being as successful as Darius. In just three years, he went from being a one man show to having the 40th fastest growing company in the United States. He was a 28 year old CEO who thought he'd brought his dream to life. Until it hit him. He hated his company and it was all his fault. Darius realized that so long as his company did not reflect his core values, scale would be impossible. His journey to create a company aligned on his core values led him to being ranked the number nine CEO in America for small to medium businesses by Glassdoor. He now scales other companies to eight and nine figures using the principles from his latest book, the Core Value Equation. In this episode, Darius and I talk about designing company values and whether or not employee values should overlap with them. We also discuss creating the language of your organization, measuring employee engagement and efficacy, and when polarization at work is a good thing, we even talk about how to find your true calling. Alright, if you enjoy this episode and want to support the cause of building better businesses by building better work, please consider subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. And now here's my conversation with Darius Murshazadeh. Darius Meshazadeh, welcome to Work for Humans.

[A]

Thanks for having me. Dart.

[B]

In the mid-2000s, you were the founder and the CEO of Twin Capital Mortgage, which was one of the fastest growing startups in the country. When did you realize that you hated your company?

[A]

That moment happened in, I believe it was like early 07 mid 07. I had started that company in 03 when I was 25. If you're a 25 year old entrepreneur, you start your company like you have all these visions of what you want. Especially me as a leader. I'm kind of a, I'm a servant leader. Like just by nature, like this is how I show up in the world. I put people before myself. I'm thoughtful about them having an experience. I treat my team like family. I consider myself someone that I would want to work for. If you're a person that wants to work with someone that has a lot of, has high standards but is a loving leader. And I of course had big vision. So my vision was I want to build this huge company. I mean if you had asked me then what do you want to build? I want to build billion dollar company. And this is where my head was at when I was literally had one employee and I envisioned having this huge office and all these people running around and it was just this, you know, it was like kind of like way you see like really happening like office and a movie. I had that vision in my head and so I grew the business. You know, it wasn't a billion dollar company, but at that point it was maybe close to a $10 million company over the next three, three and a half years. And I had the office in downtown San Francisco and it was in this huge building that was really modern and we had glass and cement floors. And it was a former startup that had went out of business. And it was in the Sega building, which is now the Zynga building, which is some other building now. I think it's owned by like Twitter or something. But you know, this is many years ago and I had a bunch of 20 somethings running around and we're a mortgage lender in our really hip metal, glass and cement office in downtown San Francisco. But there's two fundamental differences. When the business was small and I had this vision of it, it was actually a pretty cool company. It was really small, I mean, but we were like, we'd have Friday get togethers and everyone were friends and it was just like it was a way you imagine like a garage. Like it was our garage version of a, of a company. Our office might as well have been a garage. It was not a very nice office. Fast forward to having the like the stereotypical cool office and having hundreds of people running around or over a hundred people running around. But there was something that was missing in that everyone was misaligned. There was tons of friction in My company, it wasn't a happy place. A lot of the people that loved my company was small, hated my company at this point. And in fact, I was one of those people that hated my company. So I had this moment where I had an issue on a file. And I went up to one of our people in compliance and said, hey, Brian, you know, what's up with the Smith file? I don't remember the name of the file. He didn't even look up at me. He's like, I don't know, man. Not my job. I'm CEO of the company. And I was just like, my innate reaction, I'm nice till I'm not nice. And so I just like, kind of like I was like, first of all, this guy's like disrespecting me as the CEO of the company. Like, I would never think to speak to someone that way who owned a business if I worked for them. And number two, I had built a place that allowed this to happen. And so I said, well, you know, Brian, whose fucking job is it? Mine? I'm the fucking CEO. And I just grabbed the file and stormed off. And I went in my office, I sat down and I had like one of those fishbowl offices where it's a glass and I could see everyone. And it was just a really interesting moment. It was one of these pivotal moments in my career where I just said, fucking hate this company. I didn't write that in the book, but I liked that for it. I used it. Fucking hate this company. And then I said the next thing and it's my fault.

[B]

That's one of the most interesting things, is that you took ownership of an attitude or a perspective that somebody had in your company at something that you had not done.

[A]

Yeah, it was my company. It's funny, I have a nine year old and I hear that he's the kid that raises his hand and wants to always lead. I was that nine year old. I've always been a person that raises their hand. I always go first. It's just part of my DNA. I can remember being this way when I was four years old. And so I've always raised my hand. I always go first. And part of being a leader, from my perspective, especially if you're the CEO, because the kind of the buck stops with you for a lot of things. I owned it. Like nobody else designed the culture that created this outcome. I did. Nobody else owned that responsibility. I own that responsibility. I may have not hired Brian, but I hired the person who hired the person who hired the person to hire, Brian. So I own that hiring process that allowed for this to happen. And so whose fault could it be but mine? And so it was very easy. It was, it was just a mo moment where I'm like, I own this and it's my fault and I need to fix this.

[B]

So how did you figure out how to build a company that would not have that in it?

[A]

I mean, my company had been kind of had a lot of growing pains for a long time at this point. So it started having a lot of growing pains by like 05. This is a company, it was a 40th fastest growing company in the United States. So we went from literally myself and a full time assistant to 150 people in three years. And which, you know, that's a lot. And I was a completely inexperienced CEO. So it's a lot if you're experienced. It's unprecedented if you're inexperienced. So let me take a step back. In 2005, I lived in San Francisco and I was 20, what, 6, 27. I was the only person I knew who was an entrepreneur. So it was not normal. Like now it's normal. Everyone, everyone's an entrepreneur now. Maybe if the, with this downturn that's happening, that might change a little bit. But everyone's an entrepreneur. Especially in San Francisco. Everyone's a CEO, everyone's an entrepreneur, everyone's has a business, everyone has a side hustle. Having a side hustle was like driving a cab in 2007. There was no like blueprint, There wasn't a bunch of, there was no Y combinator, there was no founders, incubators, there was no tech startups, the startup, you know, tech stars, these things didn't exist. So if you were a young entrepreneur, there was nowhere to really go to get help. I mean there was, but it was very limited. And so I started looking for that help. And I stumbled upon this program one night, it was Friday night and I'm, I'm really struggling. I have probably 60 employees at this point and it's, it's kind of chaos. I nicknamed myself the firefighter in the company. I'm running around from department department putting out fires all the time. And it wasn't fun. I just didn't like it. I wasn't, it was, it was stressful and I wasn't enjoying my, what I was doing. It was a lot, a lot of drama and friction in the business. So I found an ad in Inc. Magazine back when people read physical magazines. And it was for a program at MIT called Birthing a giants put on by three people, put on by Inc. Magazine, put on by the MIT Enterprise Forum and put on by an entrepreneur's organization. And I got into this program at MIT and I went in June of 06 and when I went my life changed. I realized that there was a group of entrepreneurs out there who were studying what mid market companies were doing and taking their best practices and bringing it into small to medium sized businesses. And the person who had started the program was, was a mentor of mine now whose name was Verne Harnish, who wrote a book called Scaling up, previously had written a book called Mastering Rockefeller Habits and it was all about building scale systems. And so I go to the program in June of 06 and the first thing I learn is you gotta have core values for your business. And I remember I asked this guy, I said well how do you make them come to life? And they gave me some like kind of tactical answer like oh you gotta have T shirts and you gotta have these little core value cards and you can hang em up on the walls. And I said oh okay, cool. So I went back to my business and that's what I did. Well, fast forward nine months, ten months later and I had this incident with Brian. Nothing I had done it really worked that much. So the question you asked was how did I learn? And the answer is I got introduced to first of all, you are who you hang out with, right? And so I started hanging, I went to birthing of giants. I ended up joining EO Entrepreneurs organization. I started hanging out with entrepreneurs who are growing businesses. Secondly, I started studying what they were doing and I started. My mentor was Vern, so I started using his system in my business. But it was still a lot of trial and error. And over the next five years I practiced, I played and tinkered a lot with these different systems. And the more I tinkered with them, the more I got interested to other best practices, other systems. And slowly but surely I really developed an understanding of what are the best practices if you want to scale your company. How do you build these systems into your companies and how do you actually make them come to life in a way where it's efficient, optimal? And that's really what I did and I was rewarded for it. Honestly. I ended up doing quite a bit with that.

[B]

So if I'm leading a company I would assume that I have core values someplace in there. Maybe I've even written them down. But how do I know if my company has core values?

[A]

Great question. First of all, companies don't have values. People have core values. And so I'm always very clear with people about that. Your company is a conglomerate of multiple people's values. It's a combination of a bunch of people's values that come together. Those are your values in the business. What you have an opportunity to do is to define what the expectation is for those folks to abide by and to resonate towards and then hold them accountable to it consistently and then invite those who want to be a part of that, who agree with that, to be a part of it and invite those that don't to leave. And over time, what ends up happening is you end up having environment where we create what's called a culture of aligned values. If when what I describe happens, happens, most businesses what they do is they kind of like check the box, right? So they discover what's important to them. Oh, we care about hard work and results, orientation. And you're a caring company and we are. Integrity is important to us. Those are our four values. And then they put em on a piece of paper and they rah rah around them at a meeting. And then everyone goes back to what I call bau, business as usual. And then they just kind of sit there and don't do anything. And then they may or may not remember what they are and they may or may not use them from time to time and they're not alive and well in the organization. And what I figured out in my journey was that I had a moment in year three of that program at MIT where these two gentlemen who ran a company in Canada called Nurse Next Door, it was voted number one place to work in Canada. Great culture, core value driven organization. The former CEO and chairman is now the mayor of Vancouver. His name's Ken Sims, he's a good friend of mine. And him and his former partner John de Hart, they said, network, it's graduation night. We just finished this program teaching us how to like scale our businesses and build these world class companies. And they said okay, please stand up if your company has core values. So it's like a peer led workshop. So we all stand up because we were just taught for the last three years we have core values in our business. I stand up as well. I had six values at the time, 76 words. And so he says okay, stay, stay standing. If you could say the core values at the top of your head. Well I just told you there's 76 words and there are six values. I sat down because I couldn't, I don't remember what they Were. But not only did I sit down, half the. Half the room sat down. So 30 of these people, who I deeply respected, who all were running, quote, unquote, core value driven organizations, didn't know their own values for their company. So then they asked the next question. Stay standing. If your customers know your core values. Excuse me, if your employees know your core values, half the remaining half sits down. And I kind of had the same moment I had when Brian told me it wasn't his job. I was like, devastated. I couldn't believe I didn't know my values. And even worse than that, most of these folks didn't know their values. And the most of them, not only did they not know them, their team didn't know them, they finished everybody off. They said, stay standing. If your customers know your values, could say, I'm off top of their heads. Everyone sits down. And I was just sitting there and like, I was like disgusted with myself, but also kind of blown away. And I said, well, how is it? It's not just me. Like, everyone has this issue, like, how can your values be alive and well in your business if you don't even know em? If your team doesn't know em, if your customers don't know em, but customers might be a stretch. What if you and your team don't know them? You don't know off the top of your head, like, are they really alive and well then? And so the next morning I woke up and I just said, you know, and at this point, my business was kind of in the dumps, had shrunk down to about 10 employees. It was the Great Recession. Mortgage business was crushed. So I was not in a happy place. And I was like, okay, what do I really stand for? Like, what does this business mean? Like, why am I even doing this? Sure as hell not doing it because I'm making money right now, you know, why am I here? Like, what do I care about? And I just pulled out a piece of paper and I just wrote down four things. I said, I care about working hard, care about doing the right thing. Especially that industry was in the dumps because I'd done a ton of bad shit. And I said, I care about being innovative and I care about really wowing our customers. I know that's what I care about. Like, those are the things I wake up and I do them without even thinking about it. And I know that's what I want my team to care about. I said, well, what's a memorable, interesting way to say those things? Work hard, do work exclamation point. Do the right thing, lives. Then be innovative. Break the box. Make the clients love us. Wow, everyone. Do work, lives. Then break the box. Wow, everyone. And I went back to my organization and I said, hey, guys. And I did a rollout with them. I said, and I kind of wrote five or six bullet points under each one. What, what it meant to make these be alive and well. I said, forget about the, like these bullet points, you got to respect them and agree to them. But I just want you to memorize these things. Let's do some work with them. Do work lives, then break the box. Wow, everyone. And it was interesting. Right away, I saw a change. I saw the business start to transform. People were doing like, they used the values a lot. And I knew at that point I was onto something. This is in 08 and. But I spent the next four or five years really tinkering with this and figuring out that you not only have to discover your values, you have to design them to be used. And you need to design them to be viral and sticky in the organization and you need to teach them to your team and then you need to make sure they stay alive and well. So you got to discover design rollout, and then you need to make them come to life. And that's what I did.

[B]

I'd like to dig into that question of design, because ultimately this is a show that's about the design of work experience. And you use the word design. Do you mean design thinking?

[A]

Yeah. You know, at the time, I didn't really know what that meant. I didn't come from IDO or any of these, you know, design thinking type spots or Stanford or anything like that, or Palo Alto. I was just like, you know, mortgage guy in San Francisco trying to entrepreneur, doing my thing, or intuitively, I did come to that. Now, what I didn't tell you is that I've always considered myself a designer. Like, I'm a designer. I design businesses, I design outcomes, I design products, I design cultures. I believe that building a business is a design process. I love design. I love good design outside of my business. I think good design makes the world go round. So for me, it made sense to bring design in here. And so again, I'm not super trained in design thinking, but I believe that if you want to have a great business, you need to design for it. I believe if you want to have a great product, you have to design for it. I believe you want to have a great culture you have to design for, and I believe you want to have core values that come to life. It needs to be designed to happen.

[B]

You said a word that I have never heard before that I really liked in the lead up to this conversation, which is you said it's really important to build cultural assets. What are cultural assets? What does that mean?

[A]

Well, what does it take to run a business? When I started thinking about how I grew, grew my next couple businesses, it really came down to this. I got really, I mean, I, I had a, a calling or I was drawn to this idea of building a core value driven organization. I also, I met a gentleman who you might have heard of, his name was Simon Sinek in 2009. He was nobody then. This is before his TED talk. And I was introduced the concept of core purpose and your why. So I was like, well, your why matters kind of your North Star and your values are your fundamental beliefs. And those kind of. Essentially my belief is, is your why sits on top of your values. So if I could tell my team why we're here and our fundamental beliefs around the work we do and why we do it, that's really important. I think, I think people want to know why they're doing what they're doing. If I want to design for a culture that I want, I need to build those things. And in my world of being a banker, we would call those assets because they are essentially these things that produce value. Right? Which is what an asset does. And my position was, is that. And is, is that if you don't design them to be used, that they won't be. And so I want to build these cultural assets so I can leverage them for two things in my business. Number one, I want to leverage. Leverage them to achieve the strategy that I'm setting out to achieve. And secondly, I want to leverage them to build an execution strategy that actually makes things happen in my business. So my fundamental beliefs, I know why I'm doing what I'm doing, I know where I'm going. Well, now I gotta go and make it happen. That requires good strategy and good execution, which are other assets we want to build too. And so I have models for all three of these things that I built. Some were ones I learned and others were ones I iterated and optimized. And my belief is if you make it easy, the team will do it. So going back to this design thinking, I'm a firm believer in, you know, what Steve Jobs calls elegant design. So if it's not elegant, they won't use it. If I design my values to be clunky and heavy, well, it's simple, they won't use them. So an example of that would be ones that are, you know, when someone has 20 core values, why? Because people can't remember them. Or if they're more than 10, 15 words, why they can't remember them. If they can't remember them, they don't use them. If they don't use them, are they really alive and well? My answer is probably not.

[B]

So here's what I particularly like about this is. First of all, I hate it when people talk about culture as if it floats around in the air. Like, where does culture really reside? And the way you're talking about it is, well, it starts off by residing on something that you're going to create in the description of these values. And that that is a designed thing. It's designed for simplicity, it's designed for memorability, and it's designed to really describe the core. I mean, we just said core values, but it's really just the heart of your company. Right? And that's a hard thing to do. That's almost like writing poetry. You know, it's very, very distilled object, but it's still something that can be designed. And then because it's designed well, it's ready to hand when people are making

[A]

decisions a hundred percent. Let me say something around that. So they're in the language of the organization that helps make them come to light. Because in anyone that's listening, your organization has language, your family has a language. There's a. And I'm not talking like the language of English or Spanish or something like that. There's a way you talk, there's a vernacular. If every organization has, it's a little bit different at each one. Your core values should be designed to show that the header, those four or five key themes that you care about should be designed to be remembered. And they should be in the tone of the organization. The descriptive should say what they mean, and they should be in language and tone of the organization. Why? Because then people will understand them better. And the other thing is they need to be designed to make sure that they last a long time. They need to be designed to make sure that they don't age out because product changes. They need to be designed so that they don't change because the, the world we, we live in changes because those things aren't going to happen. And lastly, they need to be designed so that the team can't weaponize them against you because people tend to like to be right and they don't want to say like no one's going to raise their hand, say, yeah, I don't live these core values. They're going to say, no, you don't live them. And they're going to change the definition of what you wrote because words have. Can have ambiguity in them. So I want to design away from all those things because to your point, I hate the word culture more than anybody. I think it's been hijacked by HR people and by marketing people to try to get what they want out of their segments of the business. Not all, but enough where it's annoying to me. And at the end of the day, if you're owner or CEO of your division, if you run a division, you're the CEO, you're a division. If you run the company, you're a CEO of the company. I just want good results and I want to enjoy what I do, and I want to create value in the world. So how do I design for that? I'm always asking that question.

[B]

And who builds these?

[A]

Yeah, so I took this out of the book. It was in the book originally, but I used to say that unless you were going to pay for the lawsuits when we get sued, that you're not allowed to design the core values. And that came out of me being a subprime lender who dealt with lawsuits. So core values are the fundamental beliefs of the business. That's. If you look up the, if you look in the dictionary, what a core value is. It's the fundamental beliefs of a person or organization. They are the personality they are. You know, when you combine them together, the. Your organization has a personality to it, and it doesn't need to please everybody. It should alienate people. People should not want to be a part of your organization who are not a good fit. And your values can do that job for you. So I, I want people that understand. The people that I want to have involved are people that have been in the organization for a while, that understand the personality, that live the personality of the organization. I don't even care what their title is, because you may have a person who's a secretary who really gets it, and maybe your chief legal officer doesn't. I don't want them in that conversation. I want people that really understand the personality of the organization. Generally speaking, it should be your executive team because they shouldn't be an executive in your company if they don't understand the personality of your organization. But I'm not limited to that. My filter is, do they understand the personality of the organization? Do they live it and do they have something to say that can be helpful in the process of building them. Because at the end of the day, they have to be authentic. In the book, I talk about what I call hardcore values. Core values don't need to be nice. You should see when I help people design their values and they start going, I call it brochure language, or they're writing brochure language. It sounds like real fluffy and bullshit. And I'm just like, that's not really how you. I mean, first of all, this is boring. Number two, you don't really talk this way. And number three, who are you trying to please? Like some imaginary client that's never going to read these? I said, these are the fundamental beliefs of your organization. You want to attract people that resonate with this both inside and outside your organization. And when you do that, it does a lot of work for you. It takes a lot of the weight off your back.

[B]

Yeah, you mentioned something in the book which was invisible. Scale and how core values attach to action. Can you expand on that?

[A]

Yeah. So think of like this, like. And I always ask folks, when I'm. I talk to a lot of companies about this or when I'm teaching them in my own companies or I'm teaching them to a client's company, I'm like, listen, have you ever been a part of a winning team before? And you know, most people raise their hands. I said, what was it about that team? Did you guys have to double check each other's work? Did you have to make sure someone worked hard? Like, did you have to, like, were you worried that they weren't good enough? Like, of course not. None of that. You just knew. You guys complete each other's sentences. The reason for that was that there was a. It was a room filled with shared values and you guys trusted each other and you trusted each other's ability to. And competency to get stuff done. And if I'm an organization that values, I'll use hard work. Cause that's one that I think is really, like, true hard work, not like fake hard work. Because what I also learned was people have different definitions of what hard work is. And so USAU and iDart share the same, like, work ethic. I don't need to worry if you're going to, like, go the extra mile. You just are like, I don't even have to think about it. Like, it just happens. I know it's going to happen and you know that I'm going to do that. So the minute that happens, there's friction. That's removed from the system, there's an extra layer of trust. We know each other's going to work hard. Let's just say we both believe in being honest, and we know that each other believes this, and we know that's the standard of our organization. When you say something, I'm going to probably believe you and vice versa. And over time, that'll be solidified more and more, both the things I just said. So what happens is, if the organization says, we believe in honesty and working hard, and you and I both exhibit those qualities over and over again because the organization did a good job vetting us to make sure that we were the types of folks who were honest and worked hard. And then when we show up, we see it with, because, you know, we're human. We need to see it to believe it. But we see it. There's actual data that keeps coming back that suggests that it's true over time. We trust it. And over time, we don't have to, like, look over each other's shoulder and we'll take even one step back. Let's say there's a guy named Mike that manages both of us, and he, too, is very hardworking and honest and sees that in us. Well, do you think that Mike is going to worry that we're getting our work done? Probably not. And that's what I call that. And so now, now magnify that by hundreds or thousands, depending on the organization. That's what I call invisible scale, is that when we do a good job of making the core values come to life and hold people accountable to them and ask people that don't live them to leave and invite more people in them that do to come. What ends up happening is, is you get this invisible scale. You have this invisible manager that shows up. It's the core values that holds people accountable to the standard. And those. Those things just send end up happening organically. And when they end up happening organically, then it becomes a thing in the organization. And the stronger that gets, the harder it is for people that don't believe that to show up. Because the minute they show up, they're like, oh, they're going to smell my bullshit a mile away. And they won't. They'll leave. If they. If they do accidentally show up, they'll leave more than likely. And if they don't, we'll make them leave because our team will be like, whoa, what's Jenny doing over here? Like, she's on her, like, fifth cigarette break for the day. I know people don't smoke cigarettes as much these days. But like in my organization, smoking cigarette breaks was like, that was how we knew who we were going to fire by how many cigarette breaks they took. Not, I didn't even care if people smoke cigarettes or not. It was just the fact that they took so many breaks. So that's just, we were a hard working organ. Our number one core value is do work like we're, we're about working hard. So I don't care. Take as many cigarette breaks as you want, but you better work hard because that's our culture.

[B]

And how do core values drive, drive action?

[A]

So they're the standard. Right. And action is driven through accountability. So my belief is, is if they're alive and well, then they, then you have to have, you have to hold people accountable to them. And so the better question is how do they not? And how they not is when people allow actions that don't align with the values to perpetuate.

[B]

So let's take that as an example. Let's say you've got a top producer in your company who's just nailing their numbers but they're, they're crossing the core values. They're in some way, they're not living them, they're not exhibiting them. What do you do?

[A]

It's tough. I mean I've been in that situation a lot of times. Typically I, I don't want to do anything at first because the top producers generally a ton of revenue and like it's painful to think of the profit I'm going to lose. All the while knowing that a liability is slowly accruing in the business of discontent, of mistrust. There's real cost, it's hidden, but it's happening.

[B]

They're damaging the cultural assets.

[A]

Yeah, it's chipping away at the culture. Cultural assets. So the altruist says you just fire them and get it over with. The pragmatist to me has always not done that right away, usually unless it's like blatantly obvious. So my answer is if you can cut them because you're going to pay the price, at some point you're going to have to go do damage control. You're going to have to repair the damage that gets done. The longer it's there, the more it spreads. The more it spreads, the more damage you got to fix. But I've had situations where I didn't, where I was like, man, I was, it was hard. We were making, I was making too much money from the top producer. And in those cases I was like, okay, how do I. How do I build a wall around them and keep them away from people? How do I get them out of the line of fire? Because they're, they're breaching the value so much. And generally speaking, it's never worked out that well. They usually end up leaving over time. But I think I've talked to a lot of people about this, and everyone I've talked to has always struggle with that decision. Inevitably they leave, either by you asking them to leave, or they leave on their own accord because of circumstances around there being misalignment. So again, like, in a perfect world, I want to get rid of them as soon as I can. I think reality is it's hard to do that. So I always tell folks, make a business decision about it, but they need to find their way out of the organization. From a practical standpoint, when I'm advising folks on this, it's hey, like, let's figure out the plan to get them out of here. And maybe it take. It may take six months or a year. And just know you're paying a price. It's not for free. And for me, I'm okay with it either way. But don't assume you're not paying the price. That's. I'm not okay with that.

[B]

Right. And so I want to start to turn this conversation toward the experience of work, which is what this show is about, which is, if I am coming into a company and I'm somebody who works for you, and to some extent the core values are part of the user interface for me of this company. So in your experience, how does that affect employees?

[A]

Let me fast forward to my next company that I built, which actually was a much was really the true laboratory where I got to play with a lot of things we're talking about at scale. What I ended up figuring out was how do you design them, as we talked about, but it was at a much smaller scale with a much smaller business. And over time I was like, well, I need these to come to life as a scale too, precisely because of what you're talking about. Because what I want to do is I want them to stay alive and well and hopefully even get stronger as I get bigger so that my team can make them come to life. Because as the company scales, and this comes from Mercedes Benz, they call it Customer one. I. And their belief is your outside customers experience is a reflection of your internal customers experience. And they call your team the internal customers. And I'm a. I'm in full alignment with that. And so the next two parts, after you discover and design the values is you need to roll them out to the team. You need to indoctrinate them into the values. Why? Because they need to learn them so they can live them. And then once you do that, then you need to. And I go over this in the book, in chapter seven, a bunch of different ways. I want to keep them alive and well. I want to make them part of the oxygen in the air of the organization. I want the standard to be solidified, I want it to be concrete. I want people to know where the line is and I want them to stay on the right side of the line. And when they don't, they're their. I chop their toes off. And I'm really aggressive about firing people that don't live the values. And so my next business is where I, I saw something really interesting happened that caters to what you're talking about. I ended up growing that company from. It was my. The company's called the Money Source tms. It's one of the largest lenders in the United States now. And we grew the company from really a startup to about a thousand employees in three years. So but I noticed something. I grew, I grew it in two stages. I grew it from really a startup to about 300 employees in 18 months. Money was double the size of my previous business in half the time. And I had this moment, it was after I, whenever I would do a core, I called a core value rollout, right? It was like an employee onboarding where I would spend three hours with them, teaching them the values of the company as part of their onboarding and as CEO of the company. I did this for the first 500 employees we hired. We would do the rollout, we would go do a team build. And I was at a team build with all these new employees and all of our non new employees, you know, having drinks, hanging out. And I, and I overheard a lot of the employees, this is. They were, they did not know I was listening and I was not like they were not talking to me and they were not trying to impress me. I overheard them talking in core value language. And I had this aha moment that the core values had become the language of the organization. And I was like, oh shit. Like you know, they're alive and well when people are using them and talking in that terms in the vernacular. And so if my client, my internal client, my team is a product of the organization and I'm designing that product for an outcome, then I need to design for that outcome. To be aligned with my values. And the only way I know how to do that, where I can make it where it scales in perpetuity, is if the language of the organization is the values. And so the way you do that is you have to design for it. I have to indoctrinate them into them and then I need to make them come alive and well and then I need to maintain them when I do that work. Any team I put in there, any product, if the team is the product, if I put them in that system, they need to learn language and they need to use the language. And so I just started thinking about it like that. And what I noticed was it was really interesting because it was really polarizing and people, people would leave my organization really fast when they weren't the right fit. And I needed that cause I needed continuity in the team.

[B]

What were those particular core values? So that we have an example of that.

[A]

We had four values, people matter, which was caring. Number two was inspiring leadership, which was about being inspirational. Number three was strength of character, which was integrity. And number four was rock solid service, service orientation. And we had really high standards around it. You know, I'm leaving out one step which is once you build the values to be, and I always say you want to build them to be viral and sticky in the organization. So once they're designed to be viral and sticky, then that's the, what they'll do is they'll become viral and sticky. Assuming you kind of follow my full framework when that happens. Now you need to go get more granular. So I, I would design everything around the values. All of our policy and procedure, all of our SOPs, everything was written in core value language. They were named after the core values. So again, I'm teaching the language of the values, right? I want them to talk in that language. And what it did was it, it solidified what the standards were. The organization people knew what the standards were. The standards were what they were and it was non negotiable. And if you didn't live up to them, you better get on board quick because we didn't fuck around. And I'm militant about it. I'm as militant about it as you can be. And because going back to your first question, I never wanted to hate my company ever again and I never wanted to take blame for it because I had an obligation to that team member and I have an obligation to the organization to make sure these alive and well and make sure people align to them and make sure the systems and processes we build make sure that happens for their families. For the. Forget about me for a second. You know how fucked up it is to bring someone into a company and then fire them? That sucks. It sucks for them, it sucks for their family. You put them in financial like harm's way. I don't wanna do that to anybody. I'd rather never hire them to begin with. That would be the right thing to do. Take it very personally that you owe them the favor of not letting them stay if they're not gonna thrive in your company. And they're not gonna thrive if they're not aligned with my values. But I have to do the work first. My responsibility. I need to make sure that I've interviewed for it. I need to make sure that I teach them them. I need to make sure I hold them accountable to it. And if I've done all that and they still don't live up to it, then shame on them.

[B]

For the people who do stay, how is their experience as a result of the core values?

[A]

Yeah, it's like anything. Like if you're around a bunch of people who share your same fundamental beliefs and have high standards and hold each other accountable to the standards. I think that's synergistic. So the last thing that I always tell folks to do is discover design, rollout and then implement the values. The last thing is measure for efficacy. So I had three business partners, two of which were hardcore non fluff loving, non culture bankers. They didn't believe in the stuff that I loved. I had to convince them. My first business partner said, called it fluff. Like he called like this is a guy that was, he's probably my biggest fan of this work. Now this guy is a down and dirty hardcore execution badass, like no nonsense banker. And, and he's called it fluff. And I said I'll prove you wrong. So imagine if those are your business partners and you're into this type of stuff. Now mind you, like you're looking over if anyone's watching a video of this over my left shoulder or right, I guess on the screen is a pink unicorn. That was our mascot in this company. That was our core value mascot. So how did I get these hardcore. One of my partners from, was from New York, hardcore banker from New York allow a company to have a pink unicorn mascot because it was true. That's what we were, we were, we called ourselves pink unicorns. You know, people thought it was kind of like, you know, like childish. But the company loved it because it resonated with what we stood for. And so the only reason I say that is that people want to be a part of something greater than themselves. We as humans, like are tribal. We are wired from an evolutionary standpoint to want that. We don't. We. It's, it's like it's innate. And so you have two options when you're running an organization. Number one is you can build a boring organization that's not core value driven, that's not leveling up, that doesn't have highly engaged people that want to be a part of something greater than themselves. Or you can compete against those folks. Those are your two options. I'm okay with people not wanting to do this because they get to compete against me and I'll eat their lunch every day. Why? Because, to answer your question, because the folks that are there, they're highly engaged. How do I know this? Because I measure for it. I like Bain's tool, ENPS Employee Net promoter score. I interviewed in my podcast Fred Reichelt, who's the founder of nps, the other day and we talked about this. What is nps? It's a loyalty score. I get to measure their loyalty to the organization. This is real easy secret. In life, you want someone to give you loyalty, you got to give them loyalty first, you want to get it, you got to give it. So I'm all about giving it. Second thing I use is Gallup's tool, which is Q12 and that's around engagement. It's the 12 questions that measure engagement in an organization. I measured that like you took, like you weighed yourself every morning and like you took your blood pressure, you know, once a month. So I was measuring engagement every 13 weeks in my organization. And I without question could see if we were making these things be true. The engagement went up. When they weren't, the engagement went down. And the other thing I told my team was, look, core values are not nirvana. Building a strong culture is not nirvana. It is a moment in time. You have to, it's like any really important relationship, you have to constantly be working on it. Because there's two things dart that I've learned as a CEO of some pretty impressive organizations. I mean these companies were winning best places to work in San Francisco. I got rated the 9th highest rated CEO in America on Glassdoor from my team. This is a no nonsense place. I learned one thing. You wanna know what that is?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Morale goes up really quickly and morale goes down really quickly. Simple as that. Human beings are emotional. It's easy to piss em off and it's easy to make them happy. And so collectively, you have to realize that your relationship with your team and each other is fragile, and it's going to move a lot. So I want to build strong cultural assets because when it falls away from center, when it gets off core, I want to bring it back to center. And I always told people, they're like, well, I don't think the company's really living in the core values right now. I said, maybe it's not as it should, but I know we're trying our damnedest and we'll fight to get back to center every single time. And we did. But the minute I think people, like, get lazy with it and really think the work's done is the minute things start to fall off. And I just got really clear that, hey, it's easy to fix, it's easy to break, it's fragile. I want to measure for it consistently. I want to optimize the business as it breaks. I don't want to celebrate too much when we're doing well, and I want to know that it can change on a dime. So I want to respect it. Because at the end of the day, to answer your question, I know that the experience of the team matters if I want to create a great output for the client that's paying us money for the services.

[B]

You know, a friend of mine was talking about a relationship he was in, and he was having a hard time in this relationship. Can't remember if it was his wife or spouse, but when they made a breakthrough is when they started talking about the relationship as something that was a third thing in the room and that they could work on together. And so it was not, you're the problem or I'm the problem. It's. There's this relationship over here. It's this third thing. We're working on it together. And is that the way the core values feel? Like a third thing that we're all working all the time to help make these things a reality in the world?

[A]

It's the invisible manager, right? So it's its own thing. And when you treat it that way, it does work for you. It does the work. It carries the load. I don't want to carry the load of the culture on my back. I don't want to carry the load of the morale of the company on my back. I want the values to do it. And all I'm doing is feeding into the different things I need to feed into to make sure that I'm giving those what they need to be successful. And you gotta make it easy My book's all about how do you make it easy? Because it's real simple. If it's not designed elegantly, AKA hard, people won't use it. If the work I need to you do to maintain it is hard, they won't do it. If it's like learning a tough language, guess what? They won't learn that tough language. So you gotta make it easy. Like do I want to learn Spanish or Chinese? I want to learn Spanish over Chinese. I just do. It's an easier language. And guess what? Your team does too. They don't want to learn a hard language and they don't want to do a bunch of work and they don't want it to be a chore. And the minute you make it a chore, it stops scaling. It'll break at some point. It'll be too hard to man to maintain. So for me, it's around how do I build organizations that are elegant so that I can not have things break in my organization?

[B]

And two other questions about the relationship of me as somebody working in your company. One is, are those probably values that I already have and that are going to be an automatic fit, or is it a transformation for me to fit into your values? Hey everybody. Work for Humans has launched an invite only community. And if you're listening to this right now, you are invited. It's a place where listeners can meet each other and guests discuss episodes, suggest new guests share tips and just generally find kinship with other people who are building better businesses by building better work. Come join us, help us kindle the conversation. Go to elevenfold.comcommunity that's eleven fold.com community thanks for being a listener and I very much look forward to sharing ideas with you there.

[A]

Well, no, look, you have your value, your values are what they are. So I don't think values are that malleable on a personal level. And they might be different than the organizations. They just can't be in conflict. So how they come to life might be a little different, but they can't be in conflict. There's a lot of tools I use in the business. One is Strength Finder. I love that tool because that's about people's talents. And what I say is if you want to have a fulfilled team, you want them living in their values, you want them working in their talents, you want them and you want to do it with a high level of awareness. And that comes down to how healthy they are as a human being, mental health, physical health, stuff like that. So I want a team of people that are living their values, working in their strengths, and I want them to be healthy. And when those three things are happening and it's aligned to the company values organically, things just work out. It's not hard.

[B]

And do you find that it becomes a part of the identity of people who work there? And I'll give you an example of that, which is that one of the core value examples in the book was steel Sharpensteel. Nice vivid image that. I like it a lot because it's got a physical thing in it. It's not a bunch of Latinate terms that doesn't make any sense. So steel sharpen steel. Well, if that's the case, my identity in that company is I'm steel and I'm getting sharper every day. And so I can see how it could connect to that. And I'm wondering if you see people adopt it as an identity.

[A]

Yeah. So if that's really what the organization is, then yes, I think it clarifies more than anything. So the person who that's going to resonate with already feels that way and the person who's going to not be attracted to that is someone that doesn't feel that way. So again, if I have two folks, Donna and Joe, and Donna is a badass steel sharpened steel person who loves to like, just challenge her coworkers and get stuff done and really break the box and make new things happen and, and loves to learn off of their mistakes and make it even better, then a steel sharpened steel environment is going to be. She's going to thrive in it. She's going to love it. And if I got Joe, who like he just showing up for paycheck, he's going to hate working with her and he's not going to resonate with steel sharpened steel because steel knows steel when they see it. So again, core values have to have two jobs. One is to attract those that resonate and the second is to detract those that don't. I want Joe to know that he doesn't fit in. Not because I want him to feel bad, because I owe it to him, because I owe it to him and I owe it to his family that he should be in an environment where he's going to thrive and he's not going to thrive in my environment. He's going to have a really tough time being successful, whereas Donna is going to thrive and this is her, her element and she's going to invite friends who she knows who are going to thrive. The business I grew from startup to a thousand employees. 72% of our hires were referrals. 72%.

[B]

That is a high number.

[A]

I had eight people get married in that company and met each other as co workers. It was crazy. It was like I would have whole families. I felt bad because I was like, my God, if I. Something happens, I'm. They're all going, no one's going to have a job. But it was because we built this resonant tool, which was the values, and we were very thoughtful about making sure that the right people showed up for them. So again, it's. If we think of them as a third party, third asset, its own thing. It's not that I build them and someone becomes them, it's I build them and those that agree with it, agree with it, and those that don't leave. And then the more people that are there that agree to it, the stronger it gets and the bigger it gets and the more resonative it gets and the more synergistic it gets. And then the next person that shows up that doesn't, like, align to it, they opt out quick because they're like, whoa, this is not me. It's very polarizing. But that's the kind you want. You want to have that kind of polarization. If you want to run a successful company, you better be good at polarizing people because again, you're competing with someone like me who's good at it.

[B]

Yeah, I interview a lot of people about what they want from work. And I'll ask you that question later in this. In this meeting, in this interview. And one of the things that people really want is they want to find kindred. And they also want very often to find people who are as good or better than them at something, who they can be with and who they can learn from. And so the idea that potentially knowing that you have up a barrier to entry to your company that is going to select for kindred, to me, it's a very appealing prospect.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, again, it does a lot of work. Right. And so I think that people want to find their tribe. I didn't go and study, like how this stuff happens and then build it. I basically did it all the wrong ways and landed on, like, I'd like one option left. And I was like, oh, let's try this. And it worked. And I was like, oh. And then after I did the studying, I'm like, oh, this is how we're tribal. Like, this makes sense. Right. So the kindredness is around tribalism. People want to find their tribe. I Want my kids to find their tribe. I want to find my tribe. My coworkers want to find their tribe. And so when organizations are not thoughtful about who they are and let anyone in, like, whenever they say the. Did you do the beer test? Like, if I'm not willing to have a beer with that person, then, you know, I don't want to have them. I'm like, yeah, that's. That's a little part of it. But that's. That's not. That's, like, just a really small part. Yes.

[B]

And.

[A]

And we have to have shared values, and we have to have good work style, and they have to have high competency, and they can't be misaligned with the company values. And I want to have a beer with them. Now, look, they might have the four, and I don't want to have a beer with them because they're a little awkward. I might still want to hire them. Like, yeah, they're gonna. They're introverts. So what. What I find is a lot of organizations hire they. Like, we like that person. I said, you know, people I fired who I like. I like everyone. I literally do my number four strengths, individualization. I like everyone. I had to learn to quit hiring people I liked because I hate firing people more than anything. I didn't talk about this. I have a disdain for firing people. I hate it. I hate me personally doing it. My first three people I ever fired argued with me and told me they weren't fired. So a lot of this stuff came through pain, man. I just learned, like, hey, I don't want to have those conversations. I don't want someone to be upset because I took something away from them. And I get it. I wouldn't want something taken away from me. So you owe it to people to be thoughtful in using this as a filter when you bring them in your organization. That's a humane thing to do. Yeah.

[B]

I will admit I hire often for people who I know for sure are going to make me uncomfortable, and that's partially because I know I perform better when I'm around people who make me uncomfortable in particular ways. I was talking to somebody once, and this person clearly thought that what I was doing was idiotic. And I was like, that's what I need. I need that person who thinks I'm an idiot. Let's bring them on. That makes a lot of sense to me.

[A]

I'll say one. One last thing. So these are, like, all epiphanies. Like, again, a lot of this stuff was just. Because when you're building a company from zero to a thousand people in three years or you're going from zero to 150, then 150 to 10, you know, which is what happened in my first business. It's a very. I had a lot of volatility in my career. I was using these as tools to help soothe that volatility, to make it better. And it was a really interesting like laboratory to test my ideas in. And I found what worked universally, how the book came to be. It wasn't that. Man, I can't wait to write a book and go and start teaching me all the core values. I had zero. I was CEO of a huge lender when I wrote the book. Just coincidentally, I decided to leave the business right around the time I left the book. I put the book out. The book was written for my friends. The book was written because I wish someone had given me the book 10 years earlier. It would have saved me a lot of time. It was the book I wish existed early in my journey. And so that was the reason I wrote the book. But a lot of the learnings along the way were just things that happened as I was running the company. This is not written from the position of being an intellectual or a management consultant who has never built a company before. From startup to real scale. This is like if you want to read from someone who didn't know what they were doing and learned through a lot of trial and error, how do you fix this problem of how do I make core values come to life and make them become a cultural asset that creates a ton of value in a business? That's what this is. And it's done at scale. It's done from startup to about a thousand employees. And if you do it a thousand, you can do it 10 times 10x that amount. What I've seen. But one of the biggest aha moments for me in that journey was I started running into these situations because I had a lot of these tough decisions I had to make. Like really tough, like, hey, are we going to like. My business was very volatile. What I didn't tell you is it went from a thousand to five hundred people in four months. After it went to a thousand and then it went back to a thousand over the next year. So when you're laying off 500 people in four months, that's painful. That sucks. I've had to lay off thousands of people in my career. I've had to make the toughest decisions, fire top level C level people that like I just brought over from massive Fortune 50 companies because they were nightmares to work with. You know, you name it, I've dealt with it. Class action, lawsuits, I mean, you name the thing. Like I've dealt with almost everything you can dealt with as a small to medium sized business owner. And I ran into these situations a lot of the times where it was me and my business partners and I didn't know what to do. There's no school you go to that teaches you this stuff. I didn't know like what was, what was the best decision we should make given X, Y and Z circumstance that we were in. But I figured something out which was if I don't know what to do, and we are not, we're unclear, what does our core value say that we should do? And what we started doing is started pulling out the values and reading them. So I'd say so we would have these situations where I didn't know what to do and we had. One of the things I promote is to put the core values on the wall of your office. Because people walk by it a lot and they learn through osmosis, right? They'll just see them, they'll see them, maybe they'll read them, but just by walking by it over and over and over again over time they learn them, right? We would run in these situations and I grabbed my business partner Ali, and I'd say, hey man, let's go. Like, what do you want to do? This is a really tough decision we got to make. And we'd look at each other and we're like, let's go read the values. And we'd read them out loud and 99 out of 100 times we would know the answer right away. It was black and white. And normally we would say something, we'd say, ah shit. Because we, the reason we say oh shit is because we'd have to make a decision we didn't want to have to make because the values told us so. So what I say in the book, and this is the biggest learning, I brought it into my personal life, my kit, my family has core values now, is that your core value is the ultimate decision making engine that you have in your life when you design them to do that. And that's exactly what I teach.

[B]

What was it about a pink unicorn that really represented what your company was?

[A]

So I had wanted to build a mascot for the company just because again, like I had this realization that people want to be a part of something greater than themselves. Let me take a step back. I want to be a part of something greater than myself. And I was in a business. I didn't work for Google or Twitter or Uber. Like, my business wasn't cool. And I'm kind of a person that's, you know, I consider myself kind of a cool person. I like cool. Like I'm a person that, like, you walk in my house, my house is a cool house. When you hang out with me, we talk about cool shit, we have fun. I'm a fun, fun person to be around. And early in my career, I noticed when I would tell people I was in the mortgage industry, I'd watch their eyes glaze over. It happened to me last night. I was telling somebody that I was in the mortgage business previously. Their eyes glazed over in the middle of the conversation. And so it's just like, not interesting. I'm sorry, sorry. Mortgage people are listening to this. Your industry is boring. My industry for 20 plus years is boring. So I was just like someone who. I'm a creative at heart. I'm a hardcore creative. And I was like, let's have fun with this. And I tell my team, hey, I want to build a mascot for the company. And they start coming up with all these ideas, but it feels forced. And it sat for almost a year in the background. This is 2013, 14, so 14. I have a nine year old, or, sorry, I have a four year old son and he's obsessed with my little pony. Like, obsessed. Like all he talks about is Pinkie pie pony all the time. And my wife, who's a really artistic woman, she would make my son and I T shirts for Christmas every year. So she makes us pink unicorn T shirts. In fact, that's the one she made me. It's below the pink unicorn head over my shoulder. It's a black T shirt with. That's the actual T shirt. She made my son a heather gray one with a pink unicorn on it. And I wore it to the office one day on casual Friday, back when people dressed casually one day a week, not every day. And my team just went bananas over it. They just thought it was like the coolest thing. And I said, hey, if you guys hit your goal for the month, I'll get you all pink unicorn T shirts. And so the pink unicorn was born purely out of just this like, little fun thing I did. Now once it took off, I mean, it went viral in my company very quickly. I was like, well, I guess it's our mascot. And I said, well, what are we trying to do now? Back up. I had told you earlier that I had met Simon Sinek And I knew the importance of having a core purpose and a why. So the why of my company was to grow happiness. Our core values were people matter. Inspiring leadership, strength, character, rock solid service. And this is 2013 14. And the mortgage industry had just gone through a massive implosion in 089 10. I mean massive, that there was 400,000 people in the mortgage industry in 2006. There was 100,000 by 2012. And I used to tell people, and if we have tech listeners, you'll appreciate this. It would be like, Google goes out of business, Twitter goes out of business, Facebook goes out of business. And like, pick another big dog, Microsoft goes out of business if all four. And they all went out within like one year of each other. That's what happened in the mortgage industry in 2007. It was like the comet hit the earth and all the dinosaurs were dead. So it was a really miserable industry for a long time. And so I said, you know, we're like a pink unicorn. We're a mythical creature. We're happiness in the mortgage industry. And it just became a thing that stuck. We grow happiness. That's our core purpose. We know that when we grow happiness and by helping people get homes, we grow happiness by having a great team who's happy, we grow happiness. If we want our clients to be happy, we need our team to be happy. We need to live our core values to make that happen. And the core values, when they come to life and we grow happiness, that's represented by a pink unicorn. So it's just tying it all together in this creative way. What I've learned, and I'm still young, I'm 44, is that as long as I'm aligned with my values and living my calling and leaning into my talents, like good things happen, and it filters out a lot of the noise. A lot of the noise. And it took me, it took me a long time. I've just now gotten it this at 44, a calmness that as long as I'm doing those things, that things are going to be okay. And it's in my business, my family life. And I'm really thoughtful about how do I filter away from anything that takes me away from those things. So this is a lesson learned just through time. But. And my business was the first teacher for me of that.

[B]

Yeah, first of all, I, I, I really respect the process of developing a product or a method by practice. I mean, one of the fun things about reading the book is that it's the story of you doing the wrong thing over and over. But learning from it and adapting to it and getting a more. A better and better way of running a company. I mean, it's very. It's a good way of telling that story. And there's a question that I ask everybody on this show at the end, which is about your job and what you get from work. And the way I ask that question is, what job do you hire your job to do for you?

[A]

This answer probably changed a lot over the last few years. In the past, it was for me to grow, and it's always been to grow and learn, and that'll never change. In the past, it was create more. I don't think notoriety is the right word, but I would have said my job was to make me a bigger star in the world and to be more of a. Of people that a person that people respect and, and to bring me fortune and fame. Right. Like this would have been my answer five years ago. And it's been a tough pill to swallow to get away from that because there's a lot of ego that. That's in that statement. I think now it's. For me, it's. It's a vessel for me to live my calling as to why God put me on this earth. It's one of the vessels for that. My family's one, my friends are one, and my occupation is one. If I can do that, and this is a very new belief I have, then I feel like again, all is right in the world.

[B]

And that word calling carries a lot of weight in that sentence. You pretty clear on what it is?

[A]

No, I'm still figuring that out. I mean, I hired a Coach, this guy, Dr. Jeff Spencer, amazing guy. He was Lance Armstrong's coach. He was on nine Tour de France's with the team Team usa. And we did a bunch of work. I'm still figuring it out. You know, I'm getting clearer and clear. I'm at that really interesting part of life where 38 to 44 is midlife. That's when the people have midlife crises. Crises. And I got to have one of those, which was fun. Like fun in the worst way possible. I resigned as CEO of my company that I built to a thousand people. I went to COVID lockdown. I wrote a book, started a podcast and started a consulting business. And now I'm starting private equity firm. That's been the last two and a half years of my life.

[B]

I like that as a midlife crisis. What did you do? You didn't buy a sports car? I started a private equity firm. That's what I did.

[A]

I swear to God. A podcast, a book, and a couple businesses came out of my midlife crisis. But it's part of the journey, right? This is why we're here, to learn more of why we should be here. I'm still hashing it out, but my work with Jeff taught me two things. And what we kind of came up with was this formula, which is that, you know, I'm 60% CEO and 40% artist. If I'm not feeding those two elements of my soul that I. I get really grumpy, like, really unhappy. In my former life as CEO of tms, the money source company, I exited, I was a hundred percent CEO, maybe 99% CEO and 1% artist. Didn't bring me enough joy. Likewise, when I went into the world of just putting my book out and doing podcasts and not having a business, I was 100% artist and I was 0% CEO and I got grumpy again. So I think that, you know, you just got to find what feeds you and the world will tell you and will celebrate business wins and making money and getting on the COVID of whatever magazine and having your tweet go viral and all this bullshit. But that should be a byproduct of you just doing you. And if that happens to, like, happen because of it, then great. And if it doesn't, then who cares? You asked me the question earlier, and I said I would want my business should make me famous and rich. And that's how I thought of it before. And now I'm just like, who cares? That's a game I. I've opted out of.

[B]

Where can people learn more about you?

[A]

I'm on all social. You can go to therealdarius.com TheRealDarius.com is where all things Darius live. My podcast, the Greatness Machine, is a great place to find me and my musings and my thoughts. I do a lot of solos where I just kind of teach. I teach whatever I just learned or what I wish someone had taught me. And we put out that show three times a week right now. So those are the two best places

[B]

I gotta say, I respect. Three times a week, That's a schedule.

[A]

Yeah, it's taken. It's one or two interviews. If I don't do two interviews, I do one solo, which is me just kind of giving my thoughts. We have so many shows now. We're doing reruns of our older shows.

[B]

Got it. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Dart.

[A]

It's been a pleasure, man. I'm really thankful that you got to ask me to be on the show and glad to do it.

[B]

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.