Establishing Guiding Principles at SEOmoz

SEO digest

A year ago I wrote about Jim Collins' book - Good to Great - on the blog and invited companies and organizations to ask themselves how they stacked up to the qualities that make a company "great." Today, after a long and at times, challenging, process, SEOmoz is moving one step further in striving for that goal by formally announcing our guiding principles.

Many companies have a mission statement - something they ceaselessly endeavor towards (like Google's "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" or National Geographic's "to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge while promoting the conservation of the world's cultural, historical and natural resources"). Guiding principles are similar in concept, but offer a deeper look at the culture, goals and sepcific accomplishments a company is striving toward. You can read much more about this on Jim Collins' site in the Building Your Company's Vision section.

There are three elements Collins defines as "Guiding Principles" and these are the three we've chosen to tackle.

I. CORE VALUES

"The core values we choose might be a competitive advantage, but that is not why we have them. We have them because they define for us what we stand for, and we would hold them even if they became a competitive disadvantage." - Ralph Larson, CEO of Johnson & Johnson

I really liked this quote from Mr. Larson and I think it does a great job of conveying the principle of core values. They are the fundamental ideals we hold to be a part of the company's identity - take them away, and you remove the sould and spirit of what defines us. For Google, this might be something like their "Do No Evil" mantra and where you see it slip away, you feel the keen absence of "Googliness."

SEOmoz's core values were surprisingly easy to define. They're the traits we all feel in the organization but have never formally written down:

• Transparency & Generosity
  • We share what we know and what we do publicly and honestly
  • We weigh transparency against respect for privacy in cases where it may harm individuals or organizations (internally or externally)
  • We encourage and reward sharing in other individuals and organizations
  • We democratize knowledge of how search engines work and how to optimize Internet marketing campaigns of all kinds
• Empathy & Respect
  • Identifying with the feelings, desires, ideas, and actions of everyone we work with - employees, partners, customers and community members - and using that knowledge to improve the ways in which we work with them
  • Treating everyone we encounter with respect for their personal and professional lives
• Quality
  • We create tools, content, and services that provide the greatest value to SEO/Ms
  • We build superb usefulness and user experience into everything we produce
  • Our products make our members & readers better search marketers
• Authenticity
  • Incorporating our personal & company values in all our business dealings
  • Represent those values honestly with
    • rational, realistic behavior
    • intuitive, creative, independent thinking
    • flexibility and the ability to manage change
    • accountability - willingness to accept responsibility and correct our mistakes

II. CORE PURPOSE

"Why does a company exists in the first place? In other words, why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively that they could not accomplish separately—they make a contribution to society." - David Packard to HP

It's true. SEOmoz wasn't even initially founded to make money, and while all of us at the company certainly have the intent to grow financially, this is not the reason we all put in the late hours, early mornings and driving effort. We want to achieve something more and I think once again, Collins' definition lays it out perfectly:

Purpose (which should last at least 100 years) should not be confused with specific goals or business strategies (which should change many times in 100 years). Whereas you might achieve a goal or complete a strategy, you cannot fulfill a purpose; it is like a guiding star on the horizon—forever pursued, but never reached. Yet while purpose itself does not change, it does inspire change. The very fact that purpose can never be fully realized means that an organization can never stop stimulating change and progress in order to live more fully to its purpose.

We struggled a bit to properly define and phrase SEOmoz's purpose, but when we finally hit on it, it felt just right:

SEOmoz's Core Purpose: To Simplify the Promotion of Ideas on the Web

Navigating the waters of SEO are intensely challenging, but we exist now to help make that path easier. No matter what the future holds for search engines or social media or any other form of Internet marketing, SEOmoz will be driven to help individuals, organizations and companies fulfill their potential for reaching others across the web.

III. BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)

All companies have goals. But there is a difference between merely “having a goal” and becoming committed to a huge, daunting challenge—like climbing a big mountain. A true BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is clear and compelling and serves as a unifying focal point of effort and acts as a catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines. A BHAG engages people—it reaches out and grabs them in the gut. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused. People “get it” right away; it takes little or no explanation. For example, the 1960s moon mission didn’t need a committee to spend endless hours wordsmithing the goal into a verbose, impossible-to-remember “mission statement.” The goal itself—the mountain to climb—was so easy to grasp, so compelling in its own right, that it could be said one hundred different ways, yet be easily understood by everyone.

Formalizing our big goal proved to be the hardest part of the guiding principles excercise. The last year has been particularly focused on launching a massive project, and many of our original ideas revolved around this. In the end, however, we realized that no single project, no matter how ambitious, defines the companies goals, and in reality, our driving force is to provide great value to our PRO members. Thus, we set a goal more in line with Collins' advice - something that was simple to measure and easy to talk about in any one of a thousand ways:

SEOmoz's BHAG: Serve 15,000 PRO Members by the End of 2010 

Ambitious? Definitely - we've got about 3,500 members today, so there's a long climb to get there. However, we believe that the products and services (in particular, the tools) we'll be providing in the future will be invaluable, essential additions to every search marketer's arsenal. And, if we should ever get off track, these guiding principles are her to help remind us where we're going.

For the future, in whatever professional dealings you have with SEOmoz, you can expect us to uphold these ideals. We certainly won't always be perfect, and I'm sure we'll make plenty of mistakes, but these are the values by which we'll judge ourselves, and as partners in this strange new world, we hope you'll help us find the right path.

p.s. If anyone has their own organization's guiding principles to share, I'd love to link to them in this post, so feel free to leave them in the comments.

www.seomoz.org

published @ September 30, 2008