I wrote a manifesto for my company and put it on our intranet:

An attempt at a distillation of [this company]’s culture, in words we frequently use when describing and differentiating our approach:

• Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.
• Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.
• Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

These three principles govern how we relate to one another on our teams, and how we relate to our clients.

Our goal is to help our clients actualize empathy + alignment + realism in their own organizations, both externally with their customers and internally with one other.

We believe that empathy + alignment + realism are core principles of ethical effectiveness. By articulating, championing and exemplifying these principles, and by helping our clients and partners put them into practice [this company] makes a positive contribution to the world of commerce and to the world as a whole.

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These principles do not exhaust the range of values active in [this company]’s culture. However, if you look closely at those values it gradually becomes clear that they all grow out from the root principles of empathy + alignment + realism.

A helpful analogy: the root principles are the DNA of our culture; the core values are the genetic traits of our company – which is the starting point for our brand.

Our brand is developed continually through collective self-cultivation (iterative clarification, accentuation and application of our principles and core values, alongside the company traditions that support them) and collective self-presentation (our formal brand guidelines – visual identity, voice and tone, interaction style). The latter can be seen as a sort of grooming: We present who we authentically are in the best possible light.

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[This company] will strengthen its brand externally, partly through explicit branding efforts, but more because [this company] has a powerful internal and semi-internal (our clients and partners) brand community.

This is something we also can perfect internally and then package for our clients: internal brand community as the key to authentic and powerful external branding. It is grounded in a simple idea: the most effective way to be perceived as something is to actually be it.

Branding can be seen as the practice of compellingly and authentically externalizing a company’s culture. Internal branding is the conscious aligning of a company’s culture to its external brand, so the two mutually reinforce.

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• Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.

Empathy is not figuring other people out; it is not discovering what they are after, or knowing how to manipulated them to get them to do what you want them to do.

Empathy is, in Aristotle’s language, synesis, or understanding. Synesis is like sympathy, but involves the entirely of another’s subjectivity – cognition, language, moral priorities, hopes, fears, symbol-system, his aesthetic sense, his social environment… it is not a theoretical, externalized theory, but a holistic vision of life in which an understander is involved. Synesis turns parallel talking into dialogue.

Empathic understanding is the deepest form of respect.

• Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.

Alignment is not stalemate or compromise. It is not accomplished in a battle where each party pushes as hard as it can for its own interests until it has won as much ground as it can. Alignment can only happen when all parties have a stake in the other parties’ well-being. All parties must desire and aim for a solution that satisfies everyone involved. This aim has an abstracting effect: what concern is embedded in each conflicting solution? What solutions are possible that satisfy all concerns and dissolve the conflict?

Alignment presupposes pluralism: that there can be multiple satisfactory solutions. It is not a question of which solution is viable, and which solutions are not viable. It is a question of which viable solution can be agreed upon by all parties in the deliberation.

Alignment is, in Aristotle’s language, phronesis, or prudence. Phronesis is what turns churning debate into productive deliberation.

For alignment to work, all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others, but in the end, the focus of the deliberation must be, not on the parties in the deliberation, but on their shared problem.

• Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

Realism is not functionalism. Realism is also not being resigned to “the way things are”.

Also, realism is not factoring oneself out of the picure in a misconceived attempt at objectivity.

Realism means being scientific. It means cheerfully putting your ideas to the test, and letting them go if the test shows the ideas are not viable. It means cheerfully adopting another’s ideas as one’s own if they are shown to be better.

Realism means that you stay subjectively, personally involved in the problems you are deliberating, but in such a way that you are open to change.

For realism to work (and to not devolve into the poverty of functionalism or complacent pseudo-conservatism), all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others and enlarge their understanding of the problem at hand to include the concerns of the others. The group must collectively turn toward the problem itself, and work toward solutions that satisfy the concerns of everyone involved. Finally, the solutions must be subjected to test, whether that test is a formal experiment or some other criterion or standard for success.