Our Culture | Newicon

How we do it

Our culture is an accumulation of ideas and philosophies we agree with and maintain. Lots of it is shamelessly stolen from other people's good ideas, that we support and believe in. We have taken many core ideas from companies we like such as Netflix, Toyota, Space X (because spaceships!) It represents what we believe and what we aspire to be and achieve.

We believe we are on earth to change it for the better, the ones with passion and drive are the ones that do.

It's easy to list a set of values - it's much harder to live them. Culture for us is not about pool tables and funky sofas. Whilst that stuff is great, it's just stuff, and in reality, after the initial novelty, it does not create lasting work happiness and fulfilment. For us, living and breathing our values is what's important and we want to work with others that do the same. So we can do great, fulfilling work. We want everyone to help each other live the values and hold each other responsible for being role models. It's a constant aspirational challenge.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince

Culture Mantras

Our company mantras

: In the modern office everything tends to be done with email which is essentially private first. It's the wrong way around! Default to transparency, this means all communications if possible aim to be available and open to everyone in the company. We encourage sharing of information when its not possible. We are still working on the best tools and techniques to make this happen. Certainly centralised cloud systems help - which we build for our customers - but there is still a need for innovation in this space!
: Want to change something. Go do it. No one ever gets a slap on the wrist for mistakes of action.
: All our energy has to be focused on delivering and producing the best products and solutions for our customers. There is no room for politics. We keep our organisation flat and as self organising as possible. There are no ladders to climb, you are judged for your own worth independent of any artificial company grading or scoring system.
: We believe in the simple not the complex. "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" - Albert Einstein
: This means don't sacrifice the customer experience because of bogus constraints. It's very easy to accidentally loose priorities - we see people do it often. Without customers you have no business. It's very important to be led by the customer - not what makes your company easier to manage, more effective to run.
: Avoid the common pitfalls developers, and fresh faced professionals fall into by becoming dogmatic. Most concepts and ideas taken too far completely fall apart. Technology and much of life is about balance and compromise. Push an idea to its extreme to see where it falls down but always expect it to fail. There are always exceptions to any rule.
: Think physics first principles. Boil things down to fundamental truths and reason up from there.
: Safety is the enemy. Safety means consistent, boring, predictable, the same, safe, stagnant. The comfort zone is the dead zone. A business has to be new, fresh and world leading, it has to make an impact, it has to evolve and stay ahead. Change = challenging environment = learning = innovation = longevity and prosperity. It's pretty rare that a change will irreversibly damage the business, and most changes can be easily reverted. Therefore the biggest risk to a company, though it can be scary for some, is not embracing change.
: Often constraints are wrong. Technical systems often end up representing the structure of the organisation, if there is a department, there is probably a matching technical interface. But is this a good design choice for the product? We organise our team around the product as much as is practical. Constraints need to be validated first then embraced second. The business should organise itself around the value stream - (Lean engineering 🤩)
: Failure is an option. Seek knowledge through rapid failure! You don't get good at something by doing it right first time. We'd never learn anything if we had to get it right first time! Seek knowledge through rapid failure and experimentation.
: If its a core skill or responsibility of Newicon then we prefer to build it rather than buy it. This can take longer and cost us more but we prefer to be the absolute experts in what we do and sometimes the only way to fully understand something is to build it. Things we don't know how to build ourselves make us uneasy. There is nothing worse than telling customers that the problem is another companies or vendors fault, or simply not being able to fix something because you come up against a brick wall from another vendor. However we refer to the 'pragmatic not dogmatic' mantra here - if the tech is easy or not something we find inspiring and it's better for our customers then buying is an option. Software development is the one profession that will pull in an entire airplane when all you need is a fan. Think of all that surface area of unused code. Unused code can become attack vectors for hackers and introduce more potential states for the application.
: We love lean engineering and lean principles - ask why 5 times! What this means is we like to solve root problems - ask why until you get to the root problem and fix that! This relates to business issues, process issues and coding issues.
: The world is changing fast, new technologies come and go - we must all be learning constantly in order to stay ahead and take advantage of opportunities. Furthermore we have to teach each other what new shiny things we have created and how they work. This is true of the organisation and the individual.
: A Netflix mantra we love - the rare responsible person. Responsible people thrive with freedom and are worthy of it. We judge our success by the quality of our work not the time we spend on it
: Routine tasks are boring. Doing the same thing twice is boring. Following a process is boring (if it gets in the way). Unlike big corporate thinking, if you automate your entire job, you will not be let go to reduce costs! You will be celebrated and free to work on the next big idea. And we have far too many ideas than we will ever have a chance to actually work on!! The more free time we have the more time we can invest in our big ideas - and there is never a short supply of those!
: Coach and seek to be coached by others. We aim to all be educators and learn from each other as much as possible, as well as deliver fearless feedback.
: Raw materials arrive at one end of the factory and fully formed car/spaceship/airplane comes out the other end. Any one can see that if the spaceship is half way through the factory then it is half complete! Car manufacturers even have moving production lines where the car is constantly moving whilst the various jobs are being done (value adding processes) to transform it into the finished article. This is a revelation in manufacturing. Instead though, most offices tend to batch things between departments grouped by their action. Each transition between a department adds movement, storage, communication and other waste to the process. For digital systems its often worse with people passing the product to each individual in the team - this causes even more problems, like, am I even working on the latest version? In a digital world we must aim to apply the same value measuring activities to digital and virtual products as we do physical ones. We must focus on the value stream, whilst we don't have physical factories we can visualise flows and provide shared portals into work being done.
: We use about 60% of our brain to process visual information, when compared to about 20% for language. Making things visual makes management of them easier. Ways to be visual:

Use white boards

Create dashboards

Summarise complex problems on one A3 sheet

Create sensible visualisations for things requiring attention, i.e. Don’t show all 100 things working, show the 2 items big and red that have a problem

Use UI and UX skills to help create meaningful representations

Think in interfaces not implementations

Team Values

Our team values are adapted from Netflix excellent work.

We first found Netflix work on their culture and values when we were trying to find other companies who had similar crazy ideas (and they had worked). We were searching for other companies that had extremely simple expenses policy. It felt very sensible for us to trust the team to make good decisions. After all, we are a small company, and everyone is just one phone call away or email away. Furthermore without trust its very hard to innovate and produce good work. So, did we really require more bureaucracy? We just wanted a statement that said something like, use your best judgement - we were 5 people at the time and obviously they all knew me well. Is it really so difficult? After talking to HR companies and puzzled looks from staff members I found Netflix expenses policy: "Act in Netflix's best interest". Amazing - I felt validated! How can it be a crazy idea if Netflix do it! I went to work to modify this into our glorious expenses policy. After much effort, and late night coffee-fueled hard grafting we arrived at the following: "Act in the best interest of Newicon"

Judgement

You make wise decisions despite ambiguity

You identify root causes, and get beyond treating symptoms

You think strategically, and can articulate what you are, and are not, trying to do

You are good at using data to inform your intuition

You make decisions based on the long term, not near term

Communication

You listen well, instead of reacting fast, so you can better understand

You are concise and articulate in speech and writing

You maintain calm poise in stressful situations to draw out the clearest thinking

You adapt your communication style to work well with people from around the world who may not share your native language

You provide candid, helpful, timely feedback to colleagues

Courage

You say what you think, when it’s in the best interest of Newicon, even if it is uncomfortable

You make tough decisions without agonising

You take smart risks and are open to possible failure

You question actions inconsistent with our values

You are able to be vulnerable, in search of truth

You’re quick to admit fault and see it as a good lesson learnt

You actively seek feedback and don’t try to protect yourself from criticism

Curiosity

You are curious

You learn rapidly and eagerly

You seek to understand our strategy, market, customers and suppliers

You contribute effectively outside of your speciality

You seek alternate perspectives

You love to learn new things

Passion

You inspire others with your thirst for excellence

You care intensely about Newicon’s success

You are tenacious and optimistic

You are quietly confident and openly humble

You celebrate failures and what we learnt from it

You celebrate wins

Selflessness

You seek what is best for Newicon, rather than what is best for yourself or your group

You are open-minded in search of great ideas

You make time to help colleagues

You share information openly and proactively

Innovation

You create new ideas that prove useful

You re-conceptualise issues to discover practical solutions to hard problems

You challenge prevailing assumptions when warranted, and suggest better approaches.

You keep us nimble by minimising complexity and finding time to simplify

You thrive on change

Integrity

You are known for candor, authenticity, transparency, and being non-political

You only say things about fellow employees that you say to their face

You admit mistakes freely and openly

You treat people with respect regardless of their status or disagreement with you

You collaborate effectively with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures

Inclusion

You collaborate effectively with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures

You nurture and embrace differing perspectives to make better decisions

You are curious about how our different backgrounds affect us at work, rather than pretending they don’t affect us

You recognize we all have biases, and work to grow past them

You intervene if someone else is being marginalized

Impact

You accomplish amazing amounts of important work

You demonstrate consistently strong performance so colleagues can rely upon you

You make your colleagues better

You focus on results over process

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Culture

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