• LKP Culture

Like all great companies, we strive to hire the best and we value integrity, excellence, respect, inclusion, and collaboration. What is special about LKP, though, is how much we:

  1. encourage independent decision-making by employees
  2. share information openly, broadly, and deliberately
  3. are extraordinarily candid with each other
  4. keep only our highly effective people.

Our core philosophy is people over process. More specifically, we have great people working together as a dream team. With this approach, we are a more flexible, fun, stimulating, creative, collaborative and successful organization.

1 Real Values

Many companies have value statements, but often these written values are vague and ignored. The real values of a firm are shown by who gets rewarded or let go. Below are our values, the specific behaviors and skills we care about most. The more these values sound like you, and describe people you want to work with, the more likely you will thrive at LKP.

2 Judgment

  • You make wise decisions despite ambiguity
  • You identify root causes, and get beyond treating symptoms
  • You think strategically, and can articulate what you are, and are not, trying to do
  • You are good at using data to inform your intuition
  • You make decisions based on the long term, not near term

3 Communication

  • You are concise and articulate in speech and writing
  • You listen well and seek to understand before reacting
  • You maintain calm poise in stressful situations to draw out the clearest thinking
  • You adapt your communication style to work well with people
  • You provide candid, helpful, timely feedback to colleagues.

4 Courage

  • You say what you think, when it’s in the best interest of LKP, even if it is uncomfortable
  • You make tough decisions without agonizing
  • You take smart risks and are open to possible failure
  • You question actions inconsistent with our values
  • You are able to be vulnerable, in search of truth

5 Passion

  • You inspire others with your thirst for excellence
  • You care intensely about our members and LKP‘s success
  • You are tenacious and optimistic
  • You are quietly confident and openly humble.

6 Selflessness

  • You seek what is best for LKP  rather than what is best for yourself or your group
  • You are open-minded in search of great ideas
  • You make time to help colleagues
  • You share information openly and proactively

7 Innovation

  • You create new ideas that prove useful
  • You re-conceptualize issues to discover solutions to hard problems
  • You challenge prevailing assumptions, and suggest better approaches
  • You keep us nimble by minimizing complexity and finding time to simplify
  • You thrive on change

8 Inclusion

  • You collaborate effectively with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures
  • You nurture and embrace differing perspectives to make better decisions
  • You are curious about how our different backgrounds affect us at work, rather than pretending they don’t affect us
  • You recognize we all have biases, and work to grow past them
  • You intervene if someone else is being marginalized

9 Integrity

  • You are known for candor, authenticity, transparency, and being non-political
  • You only say things about fellow employees that you say to their face
  • You admit mistakes freely and openly
  • You treat people with respect regardless of their status or disagreement with you

10 Impact

  • You accomplish amazing amounts of important work
  • You demonstrate consistently strong performance so colleagues can rely upon you
  • You make your colleagues better
  • You focus on results over process

Dream Team

A dream team is one in which all of your colleagues are extraordinary at what they do and are highly effective collaborators. The value and satisfaction of being on a dream team is tremendous. Our version of the great workplace is not sushi lunches, great gyms, fancy offices, or frequent parties. Our version of the great workplace is a dream team in pursuit of ambitious common goals, for which we spend heavily. It is on such a team that you learn the most, perform your best work, improve the fastest, and have the most fun.

We also have to foster collaboration, embrace a diversity of viewpoints, support information sharing, and discourage politics. The unusual part is that we give adequate performers a generous severance package so that we can find a star for that position. If you think of a professional sports team, it is up to the coach to ensure that every player on the field is amazing at their position, and plays very effectively with the others. We model ourselves on being a team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love, despite, say, your siblings’ bad behavior. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best teammate you can be, caring intensely about your teammates, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever.

Given our dream team orientation, it is very important that managers communicate frequently with each of their team members about where they stand so surprises are rare. Also, it is safe for any employee at any time to check in with their manager by asking, “How hard would you work to change my mind if I were thinking of leaving?” In the tension between honesty and kindness, we lean into honesty. No matter how honest, though, we treat people with respect.

One might assume that with dream team focus, people are afraid of making mistakes. In fact, it’s the opposite. We try all kinds of things and make plenty of mistakes as we search for improvement. The keeper test is applied as a judgment of someone’s overall expected contribution.

Within a dream team, collaboration and trust work well because your colleagues are both exceptionally skilled at what they do, and at working well with others. In describing selflessness we say “You make time to help colleagues. You share information openly and proactively.” We want new colleagues to feel very welcome and get all the support they need to be effective.

On a dream team, there are no “brilliant jerks.” The cost to teamwork is just too high. Our view is that brilliant people are also capable of decent human interactions, and we insist upon that. When highly capable people work together in a collaborative context, they inspire each other to be more creative, more productive and ultimately more successful as a team than they could be as a collection of individuals.

While our teammates are fantastic, and we work together very well, we know we can always do better. We strive to have calm confidence, and yet yearn to improve. We suck compared to how great we want to become.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, shows us the way:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

WE MEAN THE TEAM OF YOUR DREAMS !