“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
I heard this phrase for the first time from the then CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, in an internal talk. This phrase has served as a North Star during my career as an entrepreneur, its impact on my professional life has been such that I remember the context and the person from whom I heard it for the first time.
Why is this phrase so relevant? Why do I think culture is so critical?
Let's suppose you have the perfect strategy (and all that it implies: product-market fit, business model, etc…); you must ask – who will execute such strategy? It must be a group of people, and like any group of people, they will have a culture. If that culture is not aligned with your strategy, then all efforts will be diluted. You will be rowing against the current; there will be no tactic that works, and ultimately the strategy, no matter how good it is, will fail.
This is why since the beginning of my career as an entrepreneur, amid the chaos of inexperience, I have intuitively focused on promoting and cultivating a culture that is aligned with my strategy.
At BFGO, every moment, interaction, and initiative is an opportunity to create an explicit culture that supports our mission to increase the worldwide impact of Mexico in the Software Development and Digital Marketing industries.
Our Culture is based on promoting 4 fundamental ideas:
We value individual responsibility over bureaucracy and oversight
We value team results over individual performance
We value a growth mindset over tradition
We value urgency over perfection
We value individual responsibility over bureaucracy and oversight.
Everything we do at BFGO starts from the assumption that everyone in the organization is a responsible individual who wants to be happy and contribute in a healthy and equitable way to their environment, organization, and community. This is the basis for many of our policies.
For example, since the first day we existed (long before the pandemic), we have been a “remote-first” organization. More than half of our members are outside of Mexico City, where our headquarters are located.
Another example, Mexico has only 9 official holidays (one of the fewest in the world). As such, we have created our own holiday calendar (9 official, plus 6 provided by BFGO and a floating day). We value deep work over long work days. We know that when we are online, our priority is to be productive.
The value in individual responsibility over bureaucracy and oversight allows us to eliminate many other work policies: established work schedules; time tracking; vacation, sick, or “personal time off” approvals; among many others. Yet, we are a very efficient and committed organization that meets our time and project commitments.
In general, our administrative and human resources processes are much simpler thanks to this approach. By respecting the autonomy of individuals, something wonderful usually happens: a relationship of trust and mutual growth is created, which results in involved and committed team members.
We value team results over individual performance.
Every word in this sentence (which we did not coin) is full of intention. It does not imply that individual performance is unimportant (of course it is!), but at BFGO, the team results are more important. Why?
Both Digital Marketing and Software Development are complex and, therefore, multidisciplinary disciplines. Everything we do depends on team effort. It will be useless if the title and description of an ad in Google Ads have perfect wording if it is not aligned with the campaign. These two concerns are the responsibility of different team members (in this case, content writer and search engine manager) and require their collaboration to achieve the best possible results.
Or in software development, it is no good to have an extraordinary user experience if the programmer who implements it does it with “spaghetti code.” Eventually, this experience will have to change (if there is a constant in software, it is changing), which will be much more time-consuming and costly for everyone involved. All because of the bad work of a single team member.
We value a growth mindset over tradition
The third idea of our culture at BFGO is continuous improvement, or what Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, refers to as the “Growth Mindset.” One unnegotiable quality of becoming a member of BFGO is having an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. A natural curiosity to learn, to understand how things work, to question our beliefs and our way of thinking and acting.
Being a master of one thing does not make you a master of all things.
Occasionally, it is more valuable to unlearn something than to learn something new. Our industry requires us to do so, it is constantly changing, and therefore, we must be informed and adapt to an environment that is never static. To keep up with this pace of change, it is essential to be innately curious and to enjoy learning new things; otherwise, it is very difficult to sustain the demand for continuous learning for a prolonged period of time.
These are the three key ideas and their rationale behind the BFGO culture. For more than three years, we have worked to instill and promote a culture around these concepts, moment by moment, with every action, with every interaction, and in every initiative.