Why Keeping Everybody Sucks

Scenario: "Dude, we gotta keep all of our employees. If our turnover's low, we're doing super good. Yay!" We read a while back in some prominent business magazine that a super-company boasted about their 0% turnover-rate. Who could blame them? If masses of business books, scholars, and conventional wisdom says so, it must be true. Shouldn't it? Not quite.

How Keeping Everyone Goes Wrong

You're mixing a variety conflicting values when you keep everyone you hire. That results in a blah-employee environment. Instead of getting a rockin' atmosphere of people who passionately share the same values and aspirations, you get working-drones who come to work everyday just trying to make a living. If you're looking to build a spectacularly awesome business that rocks the world for ages, forget keeping everybody. Instead, start looking for people who magnetically share your values and pursuits -- and drive out those who don't.

Why Mixing Values Hurts Your Company

Mixing conflicting values in your company is like starting a classical group with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Snoop Dogg. What happens? Good entertainment for the first hour -- but, then culture corruption:

1. Yo-Yo Ma: "Let's spend our budget on Viola string adjusters!"
2. Snoop Dogg: "No wizzle. We're spending it on weed. Done."
3. They box.

Your company's values slowly erodes for every person you keep with conflicting values. Before you know it, your company becomes another boring, lifeless, entity on the corner. Blah.

People Thrive When Working with Similar People

Think of the top five people you've worked with. Chances are:

1. Their work experience = irrelevant.
2. Their credentials = irrelevant.
3. Your values matched with theirs super-crazily-well.

No politics. No back-stabbings. No drama. That's how business teams should function. And, that's how the best companies tick: finding people who passionately share similar values.

"But suckas, what values do I choose?"

Peep this:

• Google wants super-innovative tech stars.
• Starbucks wants community-driven people.
• 3M wants super independent innovators.
• At Trizzy, we want humanitarians.

Asserts the fabulous Jim Collins in his six-year Stanford study, you don't need to choose a certain set of values; you just need to have some mutha $!@% values:

There is no right set of core values for a visionary company. The crucial variable is not the content of a company's ideology, but how deeply it believes in its ideology and how consistently it lives, breathes, and expresses it in all that it does. Visionary companies do not ask, 'What should we value?' They ask, 'What do we actually value deep down to our toes?'

Stay true to your fabulous self, get people who share your values, and watch your super-dope team rock the world like it ain't no thang but a chicken wing on a string.

Seek values.

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