Standards of Performance

Each member of the Names@Work Team has signed this agreement.

AGREEMENT

These are standards that I expect of myself, and expect of you. My goal is to create an innovative company that’s profitable and a creative force on the Internet. These are my rules for getting there.
– Antony Van Couvering, CEO

1. Ego considerations are strictly secondary. A successful company works as a team, and each person treats the others as vital to success.

2. Your personal needs – vacation, family, dating, etc. – are real and valid, and if you don’t take care of them you will become useless to yourself and the company. Your personal needs become inappropriate if you don’t provide notice, or if they interfere with commitments you’ve made to other people in the company.

3. Engage with your work. Let your curiosity and interest guide you. Learn and keep learning. Question and re-question the assumptions underlying your work. Ask “stupid” questions. Make sure you know why you’re doing something, and why it matters. If you don’t know why it matters, chances are good that your work won’t matter much either.

4. Half-assing it is not only disastrous for your work, the depressing atmosphere it engenders degrades everyone else. You probably should be doing something else, and chances are you soon will be.

5. When you run up against a problem, try either to solve it or to make it irrelevant. If after a while you’re still stuck, seek help by summoning the person best qualified to assist, but own the problem and get it fixed. It’s your problem.

6. Do the important things first, leave the easy but trivial ones for later. Important tasks left undone create an oppressive sense of impotence, important tasks achieved create an empowering sense of competence.

7. Return all emails and phone calls within 24 hours, without exception. Deliver what you promise on its due date, and if you can’t, give lots of notice to the disappointed party. Don’t go incommunicado.

8. Be generous in your interpretation of others – people you work with, customers, vendors – and try to work with their foibles. Don’t engage in petty vindictiveness (see Standard No. 1).

9. Don’t waste your life producing crap. Do it well and put your stamp on it.

10. For the sake of your short life, try to enjoy yourself.

I agree with these standards and will do my best to follow them and encourage them in the people I work with.

Signature: _____________________________

Countersigned by Antony Van Couvering, CEO, Names@Work