Delivering value in tumultuous times by honoring your values.
One of the things we at CEO.works talk about often is Value & Values. Value, often defined as company profitability, is something that keeps many executives up at night. It’s a key factor in running an organization and ensures the primary stakeholders are satisfied.
But there’s another important side of the value coin that’s often neglected or overlooked, and that’s Values. Values speak to the heart of the organization, the inner focus of the leadership team that inspires loyalty, personal growth, and empowerment across all stakeholders within and connected to the company.
We represent the combination of these two factors in our articles and whitepapers with one simple wordmark: Value/s.
Because Value + Values is a fundamental part of the CEO.works philosophy we incorporated the concept into our recent rebrand project to represent the "W" in "works".
There are four key reasons why you should consider making Values a priority in your organization:
- They act as a compass to steer the business in difficult times
- Having clear values differentiates you from the competition
- They can help you see through the fog of complexity
- Communicating those values can attract top talent.
Values as a corporate compass
Values are the soul of an organization.
For some businesses, like Patagonia or Zappos, the soul of the company—what they stand for—is plainly evident. For others, their values have either never been identified, or they value only revenue and nothing more. This is not the time to keep your focus narrow, however. Ignoring values creates a house-of-cards scenario where leaders must delicately balance attempts to increase profitability in an environment of intense competition and constantly shifting consumer demands.
Our core values act as a compass—guiding us through tumultuous waters like a steady lighthouse shining through the darkness. The past year and a half has certainly been a difficult and often dark time for many businesses and individuals, a test of agility and resilience.
An organization without the foundation of clear values can easily be knocked down by the winds of change.
Our Values set us apart
One of the core values at CEO.works is design thinking and creativity. It permeates not only our marketing and communications but the creation of our IP and our unique digital tools.
We aspire to bring creativity into every aspect of our work. This particular focus differentiates us not only visually but also in our execution and the way we problem-solve with our clients.
“The unique blend of our strong IP with rapidly expanding use cases, deep practitioner experience, and our digital tools results in our differentiated impact as the Talent to Value Company™. As a newbie in the firm, client feedback has confirmed our value proposition several times over.”
— Joydeep Mutsuddi
There are few companies that would undergo an in-depth rebrand during a pandemic but we don’t take a business-as-usual approach.
While our original brand identity was elegant and meaningful, it wasn’t bold enough to take us where we wanted to go. Our firm has expanded and transformed since the company was founded and we needed something that better reflected our growing, dynamic team.
"...we started CEO.works as a family firm. It was an opportunity... for me to exercise my own creativity and to work with people I really enjoy, [and for clients] where I feel like I could make a difference."
— Sandy Ogg
Another core value at CEO.works is humanity. While our work has the effect of increasing value for our clients, it also impacts the personal value of the talent involved. Our results are not about just dollars & cents, it’s also heart & soul. We know that when people feel connected to their work and their purpose, what they produce creates even more value for themselves and their organization. When the right person is doing great work in a critical role it creates a “Click”. And that’s what we’re really all about—we want as many people as possible to experience that empowering “Click”.
So we also built that philosophy into our new logo.
Seeing through the complexity
Sometimes the CEO.works methodology can seem complex and difficult to explain. How many small firms have their own terminology page? Design helps us simplify our communication and our execution.
Design is about peeling back the layers of complexity to find the shortest path to value. That’s what the pixels in our logo represent, we pixelate the data from our clients and use it to design a solution. The pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and when we get them in the right place it completes the picture. Then we can rapidly mobilize value.
For us, design is the shortest path to value.
Attracting top talent with the power of Values
When we are authentic in expressing our values it acts as a magnet for like-minded people, businesses, and collaborators. Clarifying your values and communicating them honestly can open the door to valuable opportunities.
“We imagine a world where human potential is unlocked, and people can rise to personal and professional fulfillment. This is where the magic happens.”
— Shefali Salwan
Because the founding members of CEO.works appreciate the power of design, we’ve been able to attract and retain top creative talent. The team at Practical Creative Works (PCW) worked closely with us to articulate our vision for the rebrand and they continue to generate innovative solutions to communicate our ideas.
It takes a certain kind of superpower to bring the rough sketches that reside only in the imagination of our leadership team and translate that into a beautiful, functional reality. From articles and papers to presentations and software—we have a world-class team that executes the company vision in a way that makes us seem a lot larger than we really are.
Our team may be modest in size but we’re always thinking bigger. Our Value/s help us deliver real value for our clients and our people.
If you want to learn more about how the CEO.works team expresses our Value/s, have a look at the short video below. Founder, Sandy Ogg, explains the details of our new logo and the meaning behind them:
