When I am in the middle of buying something, sometimes I back up and look at the experience from an existential perspective. I enjoy looking at the process that is taking place to see how the different parties are interacting and their overall posture in the exchange. While there are exceptions, I have been disappointed to see how often the process involves lies and manipulation just to get the sale. It sometimes leaves me wondering if there is such a thing as ethical sales. Then, however, I remember good sales…ones where both parties were looking out for each other and were collectively trying to create a positive outcome for each party.
There is something amazing about the people and things that aren’t normal in our world. Consistently, we find that great dreamers, innovators and inspirations aren’t normal. We can even take that further to say that quite a few people that have done amazing things in our world were labeled as highly abnormal. If this is the case, maybe it is worthwhile to evaluate how normal we actually want to be.
As we grew as an organization, one thing that I realized was that, while I had a good idea, in my head, of why JNR Networks existed, I wasn’t doing a very good job of casting that vision to my team and our clients. As we set out on a journey to define the traditional business “Mission, Vision and Values”, we struggled. Some of this struggle was because we didn’t have the kind of clarity that we needed but some of the struggle was that we just couldn’t find a way to fit our ideas into that structure. At least not in a way that felt right, had the punch we wanted it to have and embodied what we wanted to say.
Five weeks ago, I sent out my first blog of the year with a statement that I was planning to hold a rhythm of adding a blog article every one to two weeks. This is the second blog of the year. I almost ran out of fingers on one hand by the time I figured out that I completely and utterly failed to meet this goal! So, why set goals at all? How do we handle failure? How do we avoid failure…or is that even the right question?
Growth is a really interesting concept. On one hand, you could call this one of the most obvious values to have. On the other hand, it is a value that many organizations easily overlook but spend a lot of time figuring out how to achieve.
For us, growth is not a goal in and of itself as much as it is an outcome. We believe that when we are doing the right things for the right people and for the right reasons our actions will help them grow which will cause us to grow as well. To this end, growth is an outcome but a very necessary outcome.
When we sat down to write out our core values, we had a long list. As we worked to whittle it down, we found that a number of values were distillates of other values. As an example, we see honesty as a distillate of integrity. Because of this, we wanted to narrow our values down to those things that were root values and were causative of the other values we have. That is where we came up with Impact.
Often, we think of integrity as a concept relating to someone’s character and integration as something relating to processes and systems. The reality, however, is that the two words are intertwined.
We all have things that are important to us but it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle of everyday life and forget what’s important. We can either completely forget our values or, at the very least, end up making small compromises that end up getting us far off of our path. I struggle with this as well.
The concept of a Human Network is a core part of the JNR Networks design philosophy…it affects every aspect of what we do. While the concept can seem a bit confusing at first, this page is intended to shed a little light onto the topic.
