UNIO’S CULTURE

Corporate culture is not an abstraction. It is the sum of the values, attitudes, and practices that lie behind the actions and results that businesspeople pride themselves on. There is no company without a culture because there is no company without values, attitudes, and practices. A company may be unaware of its culture. Its culture may be a bad one. But it cannot escape it.

Corporations have a choice. They can choose their culture, attend to it, transform it from “talk the talk” to “walk the talk.” They can look at it as a living thing that needs improving bit by bit over time with the benefit of experience. They can learn to transmit it across different parts of their organization, across generations, and across companies they acquire. Or they can let culture happen – as many companies do. When they do this it tends to reflect the values, attitudes, and practices of the people at the top for good or for ill. And when these people at the top change, culture changes, too.

Put another way, the choice is between consciously tending to the intangible asset called “culture” or leaving it untended. We all know what happens to tended and untended gardens. One thrives and grows. The other struggles and dies.

It is our strongly held view that culture is the single most underappreciated and undervalued asset of a company – of any organization or any society. The fact that it is invisible and difficult to catalog does not make it any less valuable.

Culture can be a company’s most powerful secret weapon if it is robust and adaptive. Or, it can be a company’s biggest Achilles heel – a continuous drag on its performance or even the cause of its downfall if it is dysfunctional and resistant to required change.

Only through culture can a company develop staying power, and an ability to change and evolve through different kinds of historical circumstances.

At Unio, we have a culture – a set of values, attitudes and practices – that we try to match to our actions and results. We seek others who value what we value and share our mindset – whether employees, shareholders, clients, companies we acquire, or companies with which we have a relationship as a minority shareholder.

There are ten values that we work to put behind our actions and results.

Trust.
We want to feel the absolute confidence that people in our company can be relied on to be who they say they are, do what they say they will do, and subordinate themselves to the highest standards of conduct. We want the absolute confidence that people have integrity – meaning that they are the same person with me as with you, in public and in private, in small matters and in big matters. And we want the confidence that people will speak the truth – never knowingly speaking falsely but also trying at all times to be honest with themselves and others. And we want people, from top to bottom of the organization, who have the emotional and psychological makeup to put teams and teamwork first and create the atmosphere of trust on which teams depend.

Top Quality.
We want everything done at the highest appropriate standard. That means top quality standards, people, thinking, output, conduct, and results.

Positive Energy.
We want energy and specifically “positive” energy behind the work we do. People who put positive energy into their work are alive, devoted, determined, persistent, inventive and giving.

Effectiveness.
We want an attitude of getting things done, that need to get done, when they need to get done and done right. Getting things done for the customer, for the owner-shareholder, for the client, for the employee and getting the right things done in the right order – that’s what being effective is about. And, organizationally, effectiveness is about knowing how best to organize people and resources to get things done and how best to reward those who are the agents of effectiveness.

Intelligence.
We want intelligence in everything we do – IQ intelligence, emotional intelligence, commercial intelligence, street-smarts intelligence – the full package of brainpower required to maximize effectiveness in a world where the game is relentlessly changing. For starters, we want people-aware people – who understand other people, relate to them, know how to learn from them, and inspire them. We want dedication to life-long learning every day without which intelligence stalls and loses its edge. We want a conscious search for different kinds of intelligence to tap or to populate the corporation with. And we want an organization that makes it its business to learn about itself and about its environment – without which it is impossible to progress.

Improvement.
We want an attitude of non-stop dissatisfaction with anything but the best way of doing things or making things. We want a deep respect for incremental improvements and for the cumulative impact made possible by many small improvements. We want a sense for the intelligent prioritizing of improvements so that we improve what needs to be improved now, first. And we want a willingness to embrace big change when big change is required and to embrace it before it becomes an imposition, not a choice.

Inventiveness.
We want an attitude of openness to new ideas, to creative “out of the box” ideas and to the change that all new ideas imply. We want openness to vision without which big leaps and big moves are impossible. We want openness to people – open to what they have to offer and communicating with them as fully as warranted. And we want appropriate openness about our business – to owner-shareholders, clients, employees, and customers.

Risk awareness.
We want people to have the awareness that upside has downside, that visions have nightmares, that risk is everywhere and doesn’t go away because it isn’t seen. We want awareness that risk exists in good times and bad – and must be especially looked for in good times. We also want awareness that knowledge of risk is the visionary’s best friend and the bold investor’s indispensible guide. Without it success is less likely because the avoidance of failure is more likely.

Enduring.
We value those who want to produce things or organizations or creations or families that endure. We especially value those who see the word “endure” as going beyond their tenure or their lifetime. We value a company that seeks to last, a culture that seeks to last, relationships with customers that seek to last, and transfers from generation to generation that seek to last. We value a drive to organize oneself behind principles and forms of conduct that increase the odds of things enduring.

Ownership.
We value owning one’s work, owning a piece of the company, taking care of the ownership of others – such as the owner-shareholder’s investment – as if it were one’s own. But owners don’t just own. They maintain. They build. They enhance. They pass on legacies to others worth more than they began with. We value all these traits of ownership.

We summarize our culture this way…

We want a culture where behind every action and result is a combination of these elements: trust; being or producing top quality; positive energy; effectiveness; intelligence; improvement; inventiveness; risk awareness; an aim to produce the enduring; a spirit of ownership. And we believe this culture, a positive force in its own right, will produce sustainable, profitable growth.