Principles

Words to live by.

The rules below represent (as best as possible) the principles by which we approach things at Picket and serve as little reminders for when we indulge our impulses and end up in the weeds.

It's a business.

Picket exists first and foremost as a business. It is not a recreational exercise, a social cause or a place to shelter from the realities of commercial life. It needs to remain strongly viable within the laws (natural and manmade) that act on it. It needs to provide and generate a significant return for those that contribute their time, energy, potential and money to it.

Measure twice, cut once.

Don't rush to act or implement. Take the time to ensure that the problem is truly and deeply understood and that in fact it is the correct problem to be solving. Spend time researching, planning, designing and describing. Then spend some more. When you are truly sure that your action is the right one, execute swiftly.

Always be knolling.

Clean as you go. Leave it better than you found it. Make our world a better place.

Responsibility is monogamous.

Collaboration is valuable, imperative and natural but it requires strong structure and accountability to work. Shared responsibility is no responsibility so, to avoid diffusion, always delegate responsibility for any outcome to a single individual. If a team is involved, assign an owner who can coordinate and delegate to others.

Play a passing game.

A goal can only be scored if all players on the team are working in perfect harmony towards the same outcome. Players need to know their roles, their responsibilities, their strengths and their weaknesses and they need to communicate continuously for smooth play. Regroup and confirm goals early and often to ensure that efforts invested by everyone are contributing to the same outcome.

Package and present.

Don't don't just meet the requirement, present the solution. Package your work, make it usable and consumable to the person who'll receive it. Articulate the value in it, make it accessible and enjoyable to interact with. Don't just learn, teach.

Sharpen the saw.

Instead of sawing harder and harder, stop for a moment and sharpen the blade. Build process. Mechanise repetitive tasks. Improve, document, question, refine. Ensure that time is set aside every week to progress the business forward, not just react to client requests.

Time is money.

A service business buys and sells people's time, and the economic unit of calculation is the pervasive "man hour". Most project failures are time management failures because, unfortunately, the human brain is "time blind" and not evolved to think in linear time. As such, it needs significant aides to interact with time responsibly. If a business doesn't buy a sandwich without accounting for it, it has no business spending an hour without doing the same.

Trust is gold.

More valuable to us than time is trust. The trust of our clients and our trust of each other. Trust is the foundation on which everything else in our business is built. It means clients can ask us questions they otherwise would keep to themselves, we can propose solutions they otherwise wouldn't listen to. In a high trust environment, we can proceed on a handshake. In a low trust environment, our profits are sunk into contracts and conflict.