Did you know that on average, every single one of us wastes 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings? I'm going to show you how to prevent that. Very early on at Stride Consulting, I searched for a process to help me scale. This was my 4th company and I had my heart set on scaling in a way that I had never scaled before. I've never raised any funding. All four companies I've run have been bootstrapped. So leveraging a pile of cash to scale has never been an option for me. I was searching for a process to enable scale. That's when I discovered the Rockefeller Habits.

I am a big believer that a strong, diverse team can accomplish great things. But only if the team trusts each other, communicate well, and has a great work ethic that allows people to fully engage and enjoy work. In other words, only if the team has a strong culture. Throughout my experience in business, I have gathered many stories related to culture. The most compelling –– and hopefully helpful –– have to do with sustaining a culture in challenging circumstances. Specifically, operating as a subsidiary of a larger company.

I’m the founder and CEO of DMC, a custom engineering and software development company based in Chicago and with offices around the country. We’ve been in business since 1996, have about 170 people, and have received consistent recognition for our company culture. I’m a big believe in the adage that culture trumps strategy, so there are many things we do here to create a great culture. For the purposes of this book, I’ll focus on two initiatives that have had a big impact on employees at DMC.

Intrinsically I felt as a leader that I needed to be clear to our teams across Europe, the U.S. and Australasia in what I stood for and what values unite us. We employ 80 nationalities with just 600 team members. Hence I set about a process that lasted two years in writing and developing what makes us unique and what glues us all together. You can find this at the end of the story.