Paul Needham's Blog

Core Value: Integrity

By integrity we mean a personal inner sense of wholeness, deriving from honesty and rightness of character. 

Integrity is a deeply personal value, so how does it guide our business practices? In a business context, integrity is about being honest about what we’re doing, and doing what we say.

In our relationships with each other, with our clients, with the public we should be honest and respectful.

Last year I read about two, shall we say, entrepreneurial young men who gained licenses to operate a number of public pay phones. As licensees they would be able to choose where to install the pay phones and they would earn some percentage of every quarter that people spend when making their calls. Moreover, licensees also earn a small fee – 10 cents/call - each time someone dials an 800 number from one of their phones. If these two men could identify the best locations to install these pay phones, they could earn a handsome profit from these payphones. It seemed to be all about finding the perfect location. 

However, these two fellows soon discovered that it wasn’t so easy to make a living off of a handful of pay phones scattered around the city. As more and more people were using cell phones, these payphones were collecting more dust than quarters.

Frustrated, they determined to rob the telephone company. They brought all of their pay phones back to their apartment and clustered them out around their home office. I think there were 20-40 phones crammed into this place.  Then they proceeded to connect each phone to a small network of computers. The computers were programmed to make outbound calls from the payphones. But, not just any calls: 1-800 calls. The computers cycled through a long list of 1-800 numbers, dialing various companies across the country, calling everyone from American Express to 1-800 Got Junk, to 1-800 Flowers, to 1-800 Contacts, to 1-800 Go FedEx.  Each time they made a call to an 800 number they earned 10 cents.

Their scheme worked. Over the next few months their computers made, literally, millions of calls and they earned nearly $1 million in fees from the telephone company.

There’s innovation, but there is not integrity.

It didn’t take long for them to get caught. The telephone company discovered that they were dialing for dollars and called the police. Last I heard, the two were trying to defend themselves in court.

Now, it turns out that while they were prosecuting their evil plan, they discovered that the telephone company was actually not paying them for all of the calls that they had made to 1800 numbers. Their computers had kept perfect logs of each and every call, marked with a time and date stamp. They discovered that the telephone company was systematically underpaying their licensees. A licensee really has no idea how many people make 1-800 calls from their pay phones, and it appears that the telephone company was only paying for about 50% of the calls that are actually being placed.  Now there is a class action lawsuit against the telephone company for systematically stealing small amounts from a very large number of licensees. 

What’s interesting is that the telephone company had been doing this for years before getting caught. The two guys got caught in a matter of months. Why the difference? The two guys stole a large amount from one company. The telephone company stole very small amounts from a very large number of people. That’s why they didn’t get caught sooner.

Unfortunately, many businesses earn a margin by weaseling small amounts from a very large number of clients. 

In our industry, click fraud is an issue of great importance. People write programs that simulate clicks on ads, charging advertisers for useless clicks. The issue is just now starting to boil over. In the past couple weeks there have been more than 45 news stories that deal with click fraud. When we started the business back in April 2001 we observed that some pay-per-click search engines were riddled with click fraud. Many are still doing it today. They are either actively doing it themselves, or allowing it in their network and not doing all they can to stomp it out.

We have always taken a very proactive stance on click fraud. We have a number of filters in place to protect our advertisers from bogus clicks. I think we have been rewarded for holding firm on the issue of click fraud: our average CPC is higher than most other bid-for-placement networks. Yet, the fraudsters keep trying. And we need to keep ahead of them.  Not just because it’s good for business, but because it’s good.

That’s just one example of an area of our business where integrity provides a guide to action. 

To paraphrase Henry Ford: "Integrity means doing the right thing, even when no one is looking."

Core Value: Inspiration

According to Wiktionary, the open source, open content dictionary, Inspiration is the act or power of exercising an elevating or stimulating influence upon the intellect or emotions.

Through the conduct of our business and through our business and personal relationships we aim to inspire.

An inspirational work environment is intellectually stimulating, challenging. It contributes to personal and career development. We want to inspire each other.

We also want to inspire our clients and business associates. By producing a great product that serves real needs and solves real problems in some new and innovative way, by acting with integrity, we can inspire others to do great things. In fact, we have even inspired some companies to copy us outright!

We have inspired in other ways too. Each year we have lent some support to a development organization called NetAid. In addition to some financial contributions, we sent out emails to our advertisers and publishers, challenging them to join NetAid in their mission to eradicate world poverty. Our efforts have been quite successful: we inspired others to visit the site and learn about their work. Some may have volunteered. Some may have helped spread the word. It’s difficult to measure the full effect of our small effort, but we do know that others were inspired to donate over $10,000.

Through the power of inspiration, we can make others’ lives better, we can help our clients become more successful in their businesses, we can excite and stimulate new ways for people to achieve their goals.

Core Value: Innovation

Innovation is the introduction of new ideas, goods, services, and practices. It’s not just about new technology. It’s about new ways of doing things: new methods, new processes, new ways of connecting the dots. There are opportunities for innovation in everything we do: in customer service, in sales, in business development, in operations, in product development. In all of these, innovation is welcome.

Innovation is included here as a core value not simply because innovation can produce economic reward, though it can. Innovation is, for us, a core value because there is something about innovation that quickens the heart. Innovation makes things better, and that’s a good thing.

We believe that innovation is intrinsically valuable, and that’s why it’s here as a core value.

Innovation is exhilarating. Innovation ignites a spark, it raises your blood pressure. When it arrives, it keeps you awake. If innovation were a drink, it would be fizzy and it would be caffeinated.

However, innovation doesn’t just appear fully formed, as rabbit from a hat. It doesn’t arrive unannounced, unexpected, uninvited. Innovation isn’t wished for - it’s pursued, it’s hunted.

Innovation grows from the conviction that there is always a better way. That what you have, though good, just isn’t good enough - isn’t fast enough, isn’t accurate enough, isn’t elegant enough, isn’t efficient enough, isn’t clear enough.

Problems invite innovation. The problem might start small, as an annoying little itch. You can ignore the itch, and it may seem to go away. But, the more you think about it, the more interested you become in the problem and its resolution. It’s not that the problem becomes bigger, it’s that your interest in it grows. You meditate on it. The problem transforms into an interesting puzzle, a challenge, a seeming conundrum. Some say it cannot be solved, but you think it can.

This is when innovation is near.

Discovering and Articulating our Core Values

Core values are always present. Whether you know it or not, they are operating in the background helping you make decisions. They inform and guide. They are the foundation upon which lives and businesses are built.

Yet too often we take them for granted, fail to notice them. And that’s dangerous because they can wither and fade, become irrelevant.

Or worse! Over time they can transform into values that, given due consideration, you would not have chosen.

It was, therefore, with some mix of anxiety and excitement that I took the advice of a friend and colleague to explore and articulate the core values of our business, BidClix.

The co-founder of BidClix and I set to work. We brainstormed, naval gazed, scribbled and scratched out. We discovered that there are in fact many values that guide our business practices, how we transact with our clients, our suppliers, and employees. The difficult thing, we found, was trying to identify a small handful of truly core values – the most important ones.

By happy coincidence, our core values turned out to be a triplet of alliteration: Innovation, Inspiration and Integrity.

These are the core values that we will live by. We’re going to hold ourselves accountable to them and we invite you to do so too. Yeah, sometimes it’s going to hurt, but we can take it.