[Corner Office] Interview with Victoria Ransom, chief executive of Wildfire; New York Times, 1/26/13

Adam Bryant, Corner Office, New York Times; Interview with Victoria Ransom, chief executive of Wildfire, a provider of social media marketing software: If Supervisors Respect the Values, So Will Everyone Else: "Q. Let’s shift to culture. Did you go through the process of codifying your values? A. We did, but pretty late in the game, actually. We tried early on in the company, when we had about 20 employees, to codify our values, but we didn’t get that far, because it felt forced. But as we got bigger, we were expecting a lot of our people — that they could somehow just come in as new hires and through osmosis figure out what our values were. Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them? The values are here already, but let’s make it clear what they are, particularly because you want the new people who are also hiring to really know the values. Another reason was that we had to fire a few people because they didn’t live up to the values. If we’re going to be doing that, it’s really important to be clear about what the values are. I think that some of the biggest ways we showed that we lived up to our values were when we made tough decisions about people, especially when it was a high performer who somehow really violated our values, and we took action. I think it made employees feel like, “Yeah, this company actually puts its money where its mouth is.” We also wanted to put in more of a formal procedure for reviews, and if we’re going to review people, let’s be clear about the criteria when we consider whether they are living up to the company culture."