And The Winner Is… Passionate Execution
In an exciting twist of events, Passionate Execution came from behind to knock Collaboration down two places and clinch first place in the Duo Derby. Client-Centric came in a close second, with User Focus and Integrity bringing up the rear.
If you haven’t already guessed, everyone at Duo spent the past couple months taking part in the Duo Derby by submitting examples of Duo’s five core values – Client-Centric, Collaboration, Integrity, Passionate Execution and User Focus. Not surprisingly, many examples involved more than one core value and competition was close. Listening to the examples from staying late on Fridays fixing problems to having “13 complex wire frames passed clean on first submission,” I was pretty amazed.
What I found most interesting at today’s company meeting though, was when one of the directors talked about the challenges that Duo is currently facing. In the past two years, Duo has more than doubled in size. With the number of clients that the company has, everyone works on multiple projects simultaneously. Because everyone is so connected, when something happens to one person, many other people are affected. It looks like scalability will be one of Duo’s top challenges moving forward.
In my graduate program, we often listen to speakers from big companies talk about their success stories or work together with big companies on live cases, but we rarely get to hear from smaller companies like Duo. While I’m sure all companies, regardless of size, face similar problems depending on their stage of growth, I think there are a lot of valuable lessons to learn from not-necessarily-big-name companies. As Bo Burlingham claims in his book Small Giants: Companies That Choose to be Great Instead of Big, “big does not equal great, and great does not equal big.”
