Our principles

The culture eats strategy. Peter Drucker said, “Strategy is a commodity; execution is an art.” We agree. While strategy is essential, it is useless unless you can execute it. Our culture supports execution. Everyone owns our culture, and no tribe member is bigger than our culture. Either we believe it, or we don't. We believe it, we act on it, and everyone has the power to hold another person accountable to culture. Skills are learned, culture is a choice. We choose every day to live our culture.

Our tribe members actively keep the bar high and look out for these qualities precisely because this is what makes Arative the place where we want to work, day after day. Aratives need and expect other tribe members to go above and beyond. We believe that if a tribe member is given a pass for underperformance, that underperformance IS the new standard. This is not acceptable at Arative.

This also means allowing tribe members to make decisions, and expecting that they are going to make wrong decisions sometimes. Owners make wrong decisions too. People don't wake up in the morning and think, "I'm really gonna suck at work today!" People want to succeed. It's human nature, it's the Arative way.

We are focused on developing our people for the long-term, we are focused on long-term customer value, and we are focused on building long-term results. Do not mistake the long-term focus with the need for results; we require results. However, we will take long-term permanent results over short-term temporary results. We are focused on adding customer value, and we move with a sense of urgency. We are building a company that lasts, that takes time, focus, and effort.

We hire amazing people that build extraordinary systems. Everything we build is more than a product or process; it is part of a system.

Having systems:

• Forces us to think through the process and improve it.
• Allows for consistent and improved performance.
• Allows us to integrate new Aratives quickly.
• Allows us to easily implement new ideas, leaving time and brainpower to think, experiment and test those ideas.

When we look to add more complexity to the system, we start with "no" and try to disprove the hypothesis. Simple is hard; it requires deep understanding and thought. Enough said.

A forcing function is any task, activity or event that forces you to think about an action and produce a result. In interaction design, a forcing function is a means of preventing undesirable user input, usually made by mistake. At Arative, it means a set of circumstances that forces a decision to be made or which forces an action to be taken that previously had no hard deadline. Forcing functions are key to great execution. We engineer into the design/process/system functions that manage the outcomes.

When we think about new products, features, or processes, our answer is either "hell yes!" or "no!". We avoid the "7's and 8's" so we can focus on the "9's and 10's". If a product does it better than us, we look to buy, not build. Saying "no" to the mediocre saves time and energy to say yes to the stellar. Saying "no" to the request is not saying "no" to the person, and feeling empowered for saying "no" is usually a confirmation that it was the correct answer.

We obsess over our culture. We obsess over our tribe. We obsess over our customers, not our competitors. We obsess over our products. We obsess over processes, and we obsess over data. A culture of obsessing over the right details is a culture that executes.

Fight, flight, or freeze are natural responses. However, these natural tendencies can have negative outcomes. We believe that humans have the innate gift of self-awareness, taking a moment in crisis to choose which natural approach to take or choose a completely different option. We believe that being positive is not just a "nice-to-have" trait; it is required before you can choose a natural response or a completely new one. Stay positive.

Have you ever sat in a meeting and heard a terrible idea, but looked around the room, saw others nodding, and thought, "it must just be me". It wasn't; it is more likely that the culture you belonged to did not encourage you to speak up. You will not find that at Arative. We expect honesty and candor; we expect timely feedback. At Arative, there is no room for putting ego over results. If you disagree, say so. If you feel strongly that it is wrong, you are expected to continue communicating that opinion to the decision-maker. Some of our best decisions have been reversals of previous decisions. The leader will make a decision, it may or may not be your decision, but you will be heard. Once a decision has been made, it is time to execute that decision. Saboteurs are not tolerated at Arative.

Customization is the opposite of building systems; at Arative, we do not build one-off solutions. Requests for customizations are feature requests, we decide to build it for all customers, or we do not build it. Agreeing to customize violates multiple Arative principles and stifles innovation.

Speed matters in business; speed creates momentum; momentum carries us, do not lose momentum. We recognize that we cannot expect to meet our mission with a slow culture; by design, success is about moving forward and pushing innovation. Many decisions and actions are reversible; they do not need extensive study. We ask, "is the decision a one-way door or two-way door?". We are focused on "directionally correct", not "perfectional correct", we then adjust when needed or when more data becomes available.

Being bold at Arative means: being assertive, being direct, saying what you think, speaking up, but being respectful and being fair. We are bold in our work, in our behavior, in our attitude, in our desire, and in our interactions. Arative's mission requires boldness to fulfill; no one changed the world by being timid. If someone does not believe in our mission, then they are not on the right tribe; we will be happy to help you find the right one for you.