We genuinely believe that people are the secret to success, and by empowering them in ways that matter to them, we will create substantial value for our customers and positively impact the world.
By adopting an infinite mindset, operationalizing a Day 1 culture, and demonstrating our core values, we accelerate digital outcomes and scale with our customers as their preferred partners of record.
Digital Outcomes. Accelerated.
By the infinite mindset, consistency is more important than intensity and requires five essential practices.
A leader must have a clear vision of a bigger future state than the organization that inspires people to work to lead in an infinite game. This Just Cause, our purpose, provides sustained motivation beyond immediate rewards and encourages us to keep playing the infinite game.
Trust is at the heart of the organizational performance. When there is a lack of trust, employees feel forced to lie, hide information, and avoid asking for help when they need it. This prevents real problems from surfacing.
A Safe Space is an environment where people feel safe to be vulnerable, admit mistakes, and ask for help with the confidence that the team will support them. Leaders must continuously and actively cultivate our Safe Space.
While a finite game makes us see competitors as opponents to be defeated, an infinite game helps us understand them as Worthy Rivals, who help us become better players.
Worthy rivals can be organizations that do something as well as or better than our organization. They could have a superior product, higher customer loyalty, or better leadership. In an infinite game, more than one player can do well simultaneously.
Existential flexibility, or embracing trends, is an infinite-minded leader's capacity to create an extreme disruption in strategy or product to advance the Just Cause better. This happens when the company is already successful.
Great leaders continuously scan the horizon for opportunities and ideas to better promote the Just Cause. While a finite-minded leader thinks the risk is not worth it, an infinite-minded leader sees that staying on the existing path is a more significant risk.
The Courage to Lead is a willingness to take risks for the good of an unknown future. It takes Courage to Lead to operate at a higher standard than the law and casual ethics where Continuous Improvement and Accountable Transparency go beyond others.
Courage to Lead is not just about our actions; it all has to do with our perception of how the world works, rejecting shareholder supremacy, and having an infinite mindset.
Amazon's Day 1 mentality inspires Axelerant as our means always to remain relevant to everyone we interact with and influence.
Customers are always dissatisfied because they know more is possible, despite saying they’re happy and business is excellent. Staying in Day 1 requires us to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant and protect ideas, and double down when we see excited customers. A customer-obsessed culture best creates conditions where all of these aspects happen.
E.g., Define our understanding and fit for what we'll say yes to do; Create a framework to evaluate opportunities to help us say no; Be customer-obsessed through clarity on why, what, and how we do it.
Don't settle for what works now; continue monitoring outcomes, and adjust how things get done for the most desired positive result. Challenge the status quo and express disagreement with ideas. By sharing your differences more freely, you are choosing to make Axelerant better.
E.g., Performance management aligns with desired outcomes; People know how they contribute; Just enough process for desired outcomes.
When we ignore trends, especially those being asked, talked about, and written about, we're actively choosing to become irrelevant. By challenging the status quo, we're embracing the future.
E.g., Build awareness of now and potential; Identify critical trends to focus on; Define experimentation structures; Solicit feedback from teams.
As many decisions are reversible, we use a lightweight decision framework to make feedback-driven, good-enough decisions. And, instead of a majority consensus, we'll disagree yet commit towards keeping us moving forward and course-correct quickly when wrong.
E.g., Create a generalized, organization-wide decision-making framework; Define impact-based decision timeframes for localized or organizational-wide reversible decisions; Define default allowable decisions.
We are curious, can make decisions on our own, initiate change, and take action independently. Taking action doesn't mean we do everything alone. Instead, we know when to collaborate and when to ask for help.
We manage ourselves and don't need someone to tell us what to do to be productive. Our first instinct is to take the initiative rather than expect a policy or ask for permission.
We create working, maintainable, and understandable software that is enjoyable and easy to use. We improve the quality of the process and the client's environment.
We believe that designing and building quality software means improving the product's security, privacy, and accessibility; this belief requires life improvements and reduces harm for all users, contributors, and the people they affect.
We recognize that we can always be better. We confidently go forward while remaining open and eager to better ideas. We take the initiative to improve ourselves, the company, and our community.
We genuinely believe that there's always room for improvement. This week should be better than last, and we should ensure that next week will be better than this week. We learn new things and share those things with our peers and community.
While continually working to make things better, we prefer long-term viability over shortcuts. It is critical that Axelerant sustainably exists in the future.
By deep-diving into our industries and clients' why and means, we own the impact of our combined success.
We are committed to building an encouraging, caring, and supportive environment with clients, partners, users, and peers as people first. We're champions of a collaborative mindset towards generating meaningful value.
We maintain an inclusive environment where we can thrive professionally and personally. We keep a sustainable pace of productivity and full lives outside of work.
We maximize our ability to take on any project by creating a diverse team that can bring their experience and perspectives to solve problems. We are proud of our work and believe it is meaningful, worth existing, and improves society and human well-being.
We listen without judgment while working together towards mutual success, even with better ideas than ours.
We recognize individual accomplishments and know that nobody is worth more than the team. We have imperfections, admit our mistakes, and strive to improve.
For each other, we expect the best, give the benefit of the doubt, encourage ourselves to take the initiative to improve ourselves and the company and provide direct and constructive help.
We foster transparent conversations, collaborative expectations, and meaningful systems to communicate openly within projects, Axelerant, and the public.
We insist upon working with peers and for clients who trust our role and experience. We do our best to collaborate, solve problems, and run projects respectfully without orders.
We show trust and respect for each other by telling the truth with positive intentions while demonstrating honesty and integrity in our actions.
Our teams are built upon strengths and retrospect together to overcome weaknesses. We respond to failure with facts and effort to collaboratively resolve the situation.
We ensure that people understand their requirements by clearly defining roles and expectations. We foster transparent conversations, collaborative expectations, and meaningful systems.
We prefer transparency of information whenever possible. We do all of this while maintaining the privacy and confidentiality that every person and organization deserves.
We proudly share what we learn and what we make in an accessible manner.
We strive to be effective by developing performance measures, regularly evaluating performance, clearly communicating results, and implementing changes needed. We can drop low-impact and low-value activities at any time.
We strive to use well-fitting off-the-shelf and best practice-based solutions. We hold ourselves mutually accountable for achieving our desired objectives.
We use our principles and values as the basis for making decisions. We do our best to collect, analyze, discuss and share information about everything we do so that people can be faster and more confident with their decisions.