How we think and work

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Career at BlueCallom

How we think and work – Leadership Principles

Leadership Principles

How we think and work

(1) Unconditional Customer Focus

Customers are our partners not legal entities in a buy and pay battle. Customers are also the starting point of our innovation development method. Customers pay your salary and every resource. As long as we deliver the highest possible value at a reasonable price we can maintain market leadership.

(2) Responsibility is something you won’t be given unless you take it.

We all have to decide and judge to step in and take care of something that is not taken care of. Responsibility is the ability to respond with adequate action. Business success is taking responsibility in any situation that needs a response. A hierarchy is an information and execution flow – not an excuse for not responding.

(3) Personal Success is being bold enough to do what you love

Success comes from doing something you wholeheartedly love and finding people who love what you do. You get best at what you love and love what you are best in. If you take a job that you are not good at and others are much better at, you have a miserable work life. If you don’t know what you are good at, find it out. If you feel you can’t survive with what you are good at, understand that you have far fewer chances to survive with what you are not good at.

(4) Career

Your career is directly related to how you helped others to get to their full potential. People who reach their full potential are most satisfied, happy, and successful. As a company (the team of all teams) we are most successful if we do something that is most successful and has this wonderful sense of being helpful. The most important thing leaders can do is empower others. Those who do make a career.

(5) Speed is more important than perfection

Speed is a quality in itself. Speed means acting on something critical for success or an opportunity to win. Speed to act on something important is mostly the difference between market leadership and followers. Speed is one of the top qualities in modern businesses. Perfection is no quality at all.

(6) Market leaders are defined by their followers

Nobody can be a leader if they don’t have any followers. The most valuable followers are competitors. Make sure you never get influenced by the competition – only by the market/customers. Don’t worry about what competitors do, unless customers tell you what they prefer and why.

(7) The future is the only time we can influence

You cannot change the past. But we all have a direct influence on the future by envisioning that future and then making it a reality. Making mistakes is the result of tapping into unknown territory. Making no mistakes means you never reach your limits. In most enterprises, top-level executives are asked to take no risk and rather grow slower. That is the opportunity to disrupt them because they do not influence the future anymore.

(8) Value Creation

We exist to create value for our customers, by elevating the way they do things. Only slight changes or better pricing is not a value but an excuse for not delivering one. The best way to develop value is in concert with a team, including participating business partners and customers.

(9) The initial value of an idea is zero

Whether this is an innovation or just a small improvement. The value is created when the idea – any idea – is verified by its beneficiaries and then realized in the best possible way. Never get too excited about an idea regardless of how brilliant it may be. Only relentless execution and exponential distribution create real value.

(10) The next big thing was already created three years ago

Don’t ever hope you can make a real difference within a few weeks or months. Continuous and intelligently working in solving a real big problem, combined with relentless execution in collaboration with your early customers will create the next big thing. Creating ideas is just a few weeks. Building a prototype is relatively cheap. What costs money is bringing it to market.

Culture

How we think and work

Culture played a defining role in becoming who we are today, including all the different cultures we have. We respect those differences and never argue about another culture. Our culture is built on our founders’ history which is influenced by the Silicon Valley culture. Culture explains the way people work together but also what unique abilities and results they want to be known for. Most of the cultures in nations, regions, companies, and even families are shaped by togetherness and what they want to achieve. Also, our leadership principles are an indicator of our culture. The BlueCallom Culture can easily be explained by a few hashtags:

#Openminded #Respect #Tolerance #Passion #empathy #Team #Empowerment #Communication #Engagement #Performance #Results.

And by an above-average representation of the eight cognitive abilities that we see as critical for innovative teams:
#curious #clairvoyant #creative #courageous #communicative #competitive #collaborative #continuous.

Future of Work

How we think and work

With industrial and business administration automation rapidly evolving, humanity must rethink in two major ways:
1) We need fewer and fewer routine jobs and even more creative contributions. Autonomous machines took over the production of virtually anything except tasks that can be performed cheaper by people who earn $2 per horse relative to the machine and energy cost of a robot. Currently, more and more office jobs are being replaced by machines, and that will accelerate in the next 10 years. Good or bad? How exciting are routine jobs? How cool would it be to do something creative for the same amount of income? Innovation is such a rich field and our biggest hope is to solve more and more of the millions of problems we have on earth. The biggest need is getting back our creativity and love to do what we do.

2) We need far more creative minds than we can currently imagine. Every child is by nature amazingly creative. But from about 6 years on and for the next 20 years we lose our creativity in exchange for focus and getting better and better at less and fewer things to become amazingly good at one thing. We get unknowingly and unwillingly trained to become humanoid robots. But how can we solve the massive bureaucratization if we don’t have time to just think about all the millions of deficiencies in our gigantic organizations?

But where do we start? Every business on earth needs to at least start thinking about what would be a perfect world in the next 50 years. With that thought, we can start inspiring our teams to become more part of the overall business than part of a single process. Inspiring teams to think big – not careful. Asking the teams to help find ways to rebuild the lost creativity instead of perfecting their routine. A highly profitable 50,000-employee company is so perfectly structured that they have on average more than 85% employee “utilization”. Those industrial marvels however cannot innovate because there is neither time nor the necessary creativity left.

In the next 10 years, the 400 Million businesses will need at least one person who thinks about innovation and 2 who think about how to implement and re-innovate over time. That is 1.2 Billion open-minded and creative people – just to innovate. More than we can get and more than the jobs at risk through automation.

We at BlueCallom can do at least two things:
1) Create a work environment that stimulates creativity and pushes every boring and routine job to a machine or computer.
2) Help create awareness and help other businesses to think more long-term and help unfold the human potential for ingenuity.

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