A comment left on the previous post made me realize that it was time to discuss a subject I was going to save for latter – ethics.
While the story about the Potereo benchmarks was about relentless execution, its glib description of designing the benchmarks could be read as we cheated. Given we consciously worked hard not to, here’s what we were thinking.
We decided to work with our engineering department to create the Potreo benchmarks because we really wanted to see how our boards performed with the four applications customers told us that they used; Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker. These were applications we had never seen or ran before when the boards were designed. As we ran our tests, our engineering team found ways to improve our graphic boards performance for these applications and they made revisions to the boards firmware (its operating instructions.) The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that.
It would have been easy for marketing to skip all of this and just write a set of benchmarks that made us look good. It would have been possible to have our graphics boards recognize a benchmark and just speed that test up, but not really be faster in the real world. All these shortcuts were available to us. And we decided not to. And here’s why.
Even in the smallest of companies ethics matter. Culture matters. As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture. You can decide that coming in first at all costs is your culture. Unless your board of directors is looking over shoulder they may never know that’s what you’re doing and no one will tell you to stop.
Don’t confuse or rationalize “relentless and focused” with cheating.
Shortcuts are easy. But besides being morally wrong, in the end they come back to bite you big time. (Think about the baseball Steroid scandal, Tour de France doping scandal, housing bubble, etc.) When your employees see that it’s “an anything goes” culture you’ll find unethical behavior occurring that you will regret. And in a big company most of it is illegal and can have enormous consequences.
If you are a founder of a startup ethics begin with you. Think through if you want to win at any cost. (I avoid these entrepreneurs like the plague.)
A final note. I’m sure at Enron and Madoff there were plaques and posters about ethics. Just remember ethics and values are about what you practice when the going gets tough. It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. Do the right thing. It pays off in the end.