Culture reflects what we believe! It defines how we treat each other and how we do our doing! It’s an expression of what we value.
At teraflow.ai, we have been clear about creating a culture where everyone can develop, express their potential, and find meaning and purpose in daily work.
Central to this are the promises we make and keep, expressed through our internal brand promise. This is so important that I want to be even more precise about articulating our internal brand promise.
If I had to sum up our internal brand promise, it has been to double your value and put our staff first. But this is a chunky way of saying, and I want to refine this into the principle of Leveraging Up.
Breaking Down Doubling Your Value To Leverage Up.
We are geeky, so let’s start with a simple formula:
Doubling your value is shifting your input-output ratio, where you want to move from 1:1 to 1:2 to 1:5 to 1:N! You are increasing your output by refining your input value.
This is the principle of Leverage and how you leverage your potential.
You are the only person who can leverage your potential, and it is built on you being accountable for your input!
What teraflow.ai can do is create the right environment for you to maximise your self-leverage (subject of future emails)!
The best way to leverage yourself is from actionable, repeatable principles, and there are three that are important to the Leverage Up approach that Frank Slootman identified:
Principle #1: Narrow Your Focus.
Every good marker knows that the narrower the focus, the broader the appeal.
This is axiomatic and applies to your potential: By focusing on everything, you focus on nothing – or leverage up less. Impact comes from clear focus.
The fastest way to develop your potential is to narrow the focus on what’s important. This is about prioritising and letting go, and it’s hard to do.
This is why we are building the Design My Career and our personal branding programs to help you focus.
My job as Teraflow.ai’s CEO is to build value around our narrow focus on a Niche AI Professional Services business, helping our clients make their AI work with a core Data and ML focus.
I need to deepen our deliverability strength. I can only do this when we all understand our role and what we are accountable for.
Principle #2: Up the Tempo
Growth needs energy and intensity. We must guard against the friction of delay, where our language changes from “I will do it today” to “I will do it tomorrow or next week.”
As people join and we grow in complexity, this will become harder, creating more friction and slowing down our Flojo. As an A Player, this should frustrate you!
Increasing the tempo is about our rhythm, cadence and velocity. The better these are, the greater your ability to leverage your own potential.
Principle #3: Raise the standard
Sometimes raising the standard is less about daily speed and more about compounding your effort. We talk about being 1% better daily, built on the principle of compound interest.
Our Flojo is our Mojo, built on the “do, learn, adjust” agile principle of upping the Flojo standards. It’s refining our inputs, improving the structure, and reducing process friction. Doing this daily makes change easy! It’s our barrier to complacency and why we must increase the tempo.
All we need to be is 2% end-to-end better than our competition. It means we don’t have delivery holes in our Flojo and deliver on our external brand promise of “We Deliver!”
We prove this every day in the work YOU do, and our clients love us for it!
