How do you do business?

   What is important to you as an organization and individuals?

   What truths do you hold to be self evident?

Values and principles are closely intertwined and values are in fact derivatives of principles. Values, however, can and do change over time. The best examples I can think of with respect to values are the sorts of causes that an organization might support and norms it establishes. In the current environment doing things in a green friendly way is very important, 10 or 20 years ago it was far less important to most people.

Values need to be consistent with principles.

TheCodeFactory Values are:
“We encourage a sharing, participatory environment for business and personal growth.”

Ian Graham

Filed under: Camp Culture, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Open Source, Start-up, The Code Factory by Ian
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Where are you going?

Vision is the founder(s) ability to know where they are going. To see the goal and convey that vision to the team, investor, advisors and anyone that needs to know. Vision is perhaps the most obvious of the four cornerstones, but hey maybe that’s just me because I am a highly visual learner.

I believe that there is a strong linkage between vision and passion. In my opinion there has to be because passion is that warp drive that gets to the goal and realizes the vision. Great entrepreneurs know where they are going and build a strong team to help them realize the goal.

I recall when I first started working at Newbridge I went for a walk at lunch with a friend down Terry Fox Drive. At the time the landscape on either side of the road was largely a big farmer’s field with a few trees stretching along the property lines. Up ahead a bit I could see a group of suites with one man waving his arms in all directions showing where this and that building would be located. The man was Terry Mathews and there are now all kinds of buildings and office complexes along Terry Fox and Leggett Drive.

Vision is the founder’s passion and ability to see where you are going as an organization in 3, 5 or more years.

TheCodeFactory Vision:

“TheCodeFactory vision is to accelerate product and service concepts into teams and successful businesses that create wealth and value for the local economy. To develop a model for incubation that can be utilized across Canada and North America.”

Ian Graham

Filed under: Camp Culture, Entrepreneurship, Start-up, The Code Factory by Ian
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I usually try and post only my own thoughts and content and generally frown on what I call chirping or the practice some other blogger engage in where it is essentially, so and so said “blah blah blah”. Anyway today I will chirp like a little birdie. Here are two post from some entrepreneurial bloggers I follow that were worth chirping about.

Entrepreneurial Creed

Play to the point not the score 

The Entrepreneurial Creed is pretty straight forward and struck a chord, Play to the point not the score  required a bit more reflection. The first link was on Ben Casnocha’s blog and the second from Rick Segal. Short easy reads and well worth the time.

Ian Graham
 

Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Start-up by Ian
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Who are we and what do we do? That is the essence of your mission.

Again I will quote my favourite company;

“Google’s Mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

What a great mission statement. It says exactly what they do in plain English in a very clear and concise way. No mention of search engines or Gmail. It seems so clear and simple; however, I suspect drafting this statement took considerable time and effort with input from stakeholders throughout the company.

I have gone through the mission drafting process a couple of times.  If you are going to have a mission statement it is important that everyone buys in, had input into drafting the statement and lives the mission on a daily basis.

How do you go about drafting a mission?

Here is one way to go about drafting a mission and I am sure there are many others but at least this should help spark the synapses. The process will likely take 3 or more sessions and need to be re-written many times.

Here is a methodology I have used to facilitate the mission process:

Step 1. List all the MUST have nouns for your company; innovative, leader, …
Step 2. Finalize and short list the nouns, this may take some time.
Step 3. Use verbs to glue the nouns together and then sprinkle some adjectives to describe the nouns
Step 4. Define and refine. Repeat as necessary.

That’s it.

Here is Google’s Mission by nouns and verbs;

Nouns – Worlds, Information, Universally, Useful
Verbs – Organize, Make, Accessible

 TheCodeFactory Mission:

“TheCodeFactory fosters the development of business ideas from concept to execution by providing a collaborative environment for entrepreneurs and innovators to access services, share business experiences and connect. Entrepreneurs are also supported through fiscal and policy advocacy.”

Ian Graham

Filed under: Camp Culture, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Start-up, The Code Factory by Ian
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Mark from Real Decoy forwarded some information regarding a Drupal Meetup next Monday. You can check it out by clicking on the logo to the right.

Ian Graham

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Let the sun shine in Suite 402 at TheCodeFactory is currently available and we are very flexible with the terms, could be month to month, 6 month of 12 months. Here are a few pictures of the space which looks west toward Kent Street. The office is bright, freshly painted and comes with some great neighbours. The originally hardwood is through out and the space is really quite funky.

If you are interested or want more information please feel free to get in touch with;

ian (at) theCodeFactory (dot) ca

Ian Graham

Filed under: Ottawa, Start-up, The Code Factory by Ian
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