MSP

Our “rule of en­gage­ment”: when in doubt about what to do, choose the path that builds the most trust — the trust of our cli­ents, the trust of our au­thors, the trust of our col­leagues. You can­not (and of­ten should not) please every­body, but you can main­tain or in­crease trust.

We dream, but we have the strength to say “no” to most good ideas — we pick our fights, we build on our core strengths, and we stay fo­cused on our mis­sion. There are too many good ideas, but only a very few can be ex­ecuted well at a time. We pick the one idea that’s likely to have the most ef­fect, and fo­cus our re­sources on it.

We want our work to be mean­ing­ful and make us proud. We are renowned for qual­ity. We strive to leave things bet­ter than we found them. Our at­ti­tude is, if we see a piece of pa­per loose on the floor, we pick it up. We take pride even in the hid­den parts that no-one out­side would see.

We are flex­ible and nimble; we spin on a dime and ad­just to new situ­ations. Jobs can change at any time: you were hired yes­ter­day to do one thing, but may be needed to­mor­row to do an­oth­er. We be­lieve one’s most im­port­ant skill is the abil­ity to learn new things. We aim to stay curi­ous, stay hungry, learn new things and get bet­ter at them. Stag­na­tion is the be­gin­ning of de­cay.

If we all agree on something without de­bate, it may be that we’re not wrong, but it’s al­most cer­tain that we haven’t thought things through. Every­one should ask, “why?”, “how much time should I spend?”, “what should I not do in­stead?”, “what gets pushed to the back­burn­er?”, “are you sure it’s worth it?” Every­one should un­der­stand why they’re do­ing something and how their work fits in with every­one else’s.

Mak­ing a good de­cision fast is bet­ter than mak­ing the best de­cision too late. Also, we know that pleas­ing every­one ends up serving no-one well. On each task there is one per­son on point, who so­li­cits in­put and wel­comes de­bate, but ul­ti­mately makes the call, owns the de­cision, drives the ex­e­cu­tion, and takes re­spons­ib­il­ity.