From the Inside Out: Building a Company Vision and Mission (part III)

As many of you have been following we’ve begun the process of creating a company vision. Last time we left off we were ready to dive into our BHAG (big hairy audacious goal). I promised you guys that we would open the doors and be completely transparent during this process so I’m going to be totally honest: coming up with a company vision is a long and difficult road!

The latest:

We’re at the stage where we have selected our MARS group and divided the whole company into 3 groups from which each of the 6 MARS members will be soliciting feedback. Members of customer support will be interviewing Developers, Developers are interviewing Operations and Marketing, and Operations and Marketing are interviewing Customer Support (or some sort of mix along those lines).

Inter-departmental communication is rich and valuable in so many ways but it certainly does make it difficult to schedule and find time to meet. Pulling a developer off his code work to sit down and talk about values is much easier said than done, take it from me! 🙂 That said, some of the most ingenious ideas and invaluable feedback have come out of this process. It’s amazing what happens when you get different groups of people together who aren’t used to working closely with one another. Interviews involve questions like, “What do you value?” “What does this company value?” “Where do you see us in 10 years?” “Where do you want to see us in 10 years?” Each one of us with our unique perspectives approach these questions differently.

There are a few values, such as ‘fun’ and ‘goodwill’ that everyone can get behind rather easily (mmhmm, you saw that right, we value fun). Other values however, like, “innovation” come with much more debate. In going through these exercises it has really opened my eyes as to what a special group of people we have here. We aren’t just coworkers, we’re friends. To take that one step further, we’re not just friends we’re family. And we have a lot of really good ideas about what this company is and where it should be headed. The challenge now knocking out the remainder of interviews that have been near impossible to schedule. Secondly, we need to sift through all this feedback so that we can get to a place where we can all put a stake in the ground and firmly stand behind our values, sync on vision, and actively chip away, in our own personal day-to-day, moment-to-moment tasks, to get to where we want to go.

If you can’t tell, I’m energized. Name.com already rocks but we are all so eager and motivated to take it to the next level. There is electrifying energy and momentum running through this office – so get ready, there are a lot of great things to come.

What does Name.com mean to you? What do you think our purpose is? We’d love to hear from you…we won’t even hassle you for an interview.