Stickerables

Lots of companies have formal company values, and they can be useful. Among other things, it’s helpful to be clear on what you are trying to be as an organization. On the other hand, one of Enron’s four company values was Integrity.

At USDR, we did something a little different to communicate who we were, and it felt more organic: we kept a running doc of what we called “stickerables”. These were, basically, things someone in the organization said that we liked and kept repeating. (The name came from the idea that these could mostly fit on stickers.)

A few examples:

Demos, not memos
Who do you call when it breaks?
Run to the fire
Make them the heroes (referring to the civil servants we worked with)
Make the damn website work
Build with, not for

These aren’t traditional values, and they’re not written in a particularly uniform fashion. This is only a small subset–we had a Google Doc with dozens of these, and anyone who joined had access. The whole idea started early on when Raylene Yung (one of our cofounders, and the first CEO) just started writing down things we said a lot to share with new volunteers, rather than doing some big values exercise.

What this meant is that the stickerables were things we actually said and talked about, rather than aspirational values from Leadership. That both made it feel less top down and also avoided the sort of over-simplification that can happen when you try to reduce your culture to four words.

Instead, it worked as a constellation of conceptual pointers that, taken holistically, helped you locate where USDR’s ethos sat in a richer concept space. It conveyed a specific, nuanced vibe, as opposed to the way company values can get reduced to a set of rules–that then, of course, get broken (see: Enron) or weaponized (see: have you ever worked at a company?)