The contrast between the enjoyable journey that could have been, and the one we actually experienced related in many ways to the tribulations small businesses face while moving toward their goals. When employees don’t understand the company’s values and instead perform work in ways they think best, the company creates an environment that generates opposing wind and waves. Effort is diffused, ideas are misaligned and ultimately customers pay the price in poor service.

In our first ever attempt to align everyone at the company – and get us all paddling in synch so to speak, I created a 45 day long blitz designed to teach specific departmental values, while also encouraging individual ideas and contribution. Here’s how it worked.

To keep things simple, I divided the company into three groups – and then assigned a specific value to each group.
Group A:   Those that interfaced daily with existing clients
Value:         Cultivate loyalty. (Increase our client’s motivation to remain a customer for life.)

Group B:  Those involved with marketing and selling to prospective clients
Value:        Cultivate desire.  (Increase the prospects desire to become a Cogent Road customer)

Group C:  Those involved with management, engineering or back office work.
Value:        Cultivate innovation. (Increase the ability to create better ways of doing things)

Lastly I assigned one overarching corporate value for all groups.
Value for all employees: Cultivate Excellence. (Increase our ability to become the best).

On Monday morning, June 1st we kicked off the blitz – complete with posters and a blitzed themed office decor. As employees filtered in to the office that morning they were presented with a small, newly sprouted plant in a colorful pot. Each pot was preassigned to an individual employee. On one side of the pot the label read (in the case of a customer service employee, for example) “I am cultivating loyalty”. On the other side the main corporate value, “I am cultivating excellence”. The idea for the blitz was that every employee was to “cultivate” his or her plant – the plant symbolizing their designated values. Each person had free rein to come up with any idea they wished to make the plant grow and no one would tell them what to do. The only rule was that during the week, the plants had to remain in the office. At the end of 45 days whomever had the largest, healthiest plant and also best demonstrated innovative cultivation tactics would win a very nice prize.

During the blitz employees could not avoid reading and re-reading their own departmental value and the overarching corporate value clearly labeled on their plants. As they thought about different ways to “cultivate” their plant, they would also be learning how to think and execute ideas on their own. They exercise encouraged self management because no one was telling them what to do or how to do it. I believed the blitz would strengthen our corporate innovation muscle. To further stimulate thinking and ideation, we offered weekly prizes to individuals that submitted department specific ideas in alignment with their values.

The results were beyond my expectations. New bonds formed as people interacted with others not normally in their sphere. One example was the customer service reps carrying plants into programmer’s offices in hopes of placing them by the window for the day. And we laughed uproariously at some of the wacky ideas people had to cultivate their plants. (FYI, washing a plant’s roots will not help in the least).

In the end, Linh, one of our tax product managers won a 40” flat screen TV with a plant many believed had to be on steroids. Quan (or “Q” as he is known around the office), came in second and won a night on the town for he and his girlfriend.

And Cogent Road won too.

With the quickened pace of our California software company just hours away, and the quiet stillness of Tennessee only hours past, I’m stuck in a place that’s got me thinking just how important having a clear vision of who you are and what you want to be is to the success of your business.

You can learn a lot by watching chickens. Or fire ants. Or the way horses respond to a looming thunderstorm. Nature, for all practical purposes, is reactionary. The response may be simple, the way fire ants pour out of a hole made in their ant hill in such volumes it looks like blood streaming from some mortal wound. Or nature may respond complexly and more slowly, as in the way a tree will grow too tall for its own roots as it strains for light in a dense forest. Yet, no matter how beautiful, nature is a well orchestrated symphony of cause and effect.

Man, however is not a part of this symphony. We sit outside of nature’s rules in much the same way as the composer transcends the boundaries of the symphony being played. Man is gifted with the greatest of all gifts, an ability to envision, a capacity to create.

If you are a business owner, or an aspiring one, my weekend excursion into nature has compelled me to share one bit of advice: You will be successful if you continue to think and create. As you strive after your vision, you will grow. Become reactionary, (which this weekend has taught is the natural way of things) and you will stagnate. Keep creating. Keep growing.

My partner and I began Cogent Road with a simple vision – provide loan officers with innovative software that can help boost their business, and ultimately their incomes. This caused us to think about different ways in which our software could deliver this vision. Rather than trying to be a specific type of company, we focused solely on helping our clients. We began in 2001 with a credit platform we leased from a third party. As we thought about our vision, we created different ideas in which credit could be used to increase our client’s business. This led to ideas on how we could help our loan officer clients help their own client’s, the borrowers. It led to ideas in which credit could be used to increase our client’s word of mouth business from referring sources and previous borrowers. The led us to create Funding Suite, and in turn the concept of credit proofreading, which we believe to be the most powerful business building strategy a loan officer can use. And credit proofreading is leading us into new software offerings for loan officers that Cogent Road could never have anticipated just a few years ago.

Reflecting back on a weekend lived right out of the pages of Field and Stream, I realized how much we, as business people need vision. Perhaps for the first time I realized how contrary to nature a creative vision actually is. And likewise how difficult. Vision takes thought, and thinking may well be the hardest work a man can do. So it goes that I encourage you, wherever you find yourself right now, to begin creating. Begin the work of thinking about what you want to do and why you want to do it. Then by all means get to doing it. Break free of the reactionary nature of your industry, your competitors or even your own habitual way of looking at your business.

You possess what nature does not – the ability to create. Now get composing.