The Story of Culture By Choice: Part 1

In 2009, my partner Larry Hake and I were both wondering what we would do in our fairly recent retirements. Larry retired after more than 36 years in the private sector and I after more than 37 years in the public and not-for- profit sector. We both had our share of experiences that resulted in our belief that too many approached those worlds the wrong way. We believed there was a better way. It’s not a war, even though most people see it that way. Most managers do not want to, nor do they intend to, enslave the masses! Most workers do not want to, nor do they intend to, steal their employers blind? But, perception is the key foundation of each of our own realities and if our perception of others indicates that their intentions are less than honorable, that will be our reality!

We began putting together our idea for our joint adventure by believing we could help people start businesses that began with the best perception of both sides from the very beginning. We thought if we found the right mix of people, we could help them get off to a great start and along with a third individual, Bill Metcalf, we started LBJ Investment Partners. It didn’t take long for us to realize that finding people with positive perceptions about people who were fundamentally different from one another was going to be very difficult. People seemed to be ingrained with a belief system that said different equals bad. We realized that we had to help people recognize the sources of our differences, understand how those differences are not only good but absolutely necessary, and how to best interact and work with the great variety of people we encounter in our lives. To help us move in this direction, Bill introduced us to Zeke Lopez. This was our first step into our business of helping businesses transition from an adversarial relationship between management and workers into businesses characterized by collaboration, cooperation, a learning focus, mutual respect, and a desire to truly understand one another.

Zeke introduced us to axiology, the study of human values, and to the world of what many refer to as “personality assessments.” Zeke did not, nor do we refer to the assessments we use as personality assessments. We also do not refer to the reports our assessments generate as personality profiles. We look at the generated reports from our assessments as windows into the causes of human behavior. Zeke introduced us and trained us in using 3 different assessments. First was the Hartman Values Profile. Second was the DISC Assessment of behavioral tendencies. And third was the Motivators Assessment. We initially gave our clients each of these assessments and reviewed the results with them. It resulted in over 60 pages of interpretation of the results. We quickly saw that saw that this amount of information was overwhelming to our clients and therefore would most likely be useless for them.

Meanwhile, Bill introduced us to a marketing person he had worked with and Cheryl Lohner joined our team. Not long after that Bill decided he was better off back to his old Raving Fans business and LBJ Investment Partners list it’s B and we decided to start doing business as Win the Bigger Game. We continued to struggle with these lengthy reports so I pulled what I believed to be the most critical pieces of information out of the reports to create what we later would call our Core Advantage Report. I did this manually, cutting and pasting pieces of each report to create a more useful, 13 page composite report. It very quickly became evident that this was too labor intensive to be sustainable, so Cheryl volunteered to contact Zeke, from whom we attained access to the assessments, to see if we could get the process automated. Zeke introduced us to Brandon Parker who quickly said, sure we can do that. Together, Cheryl and I pulled all the pieces together and Cheryl got our ideas to Brandon and in a few weeks we had our first iteration of our Core Advantage Report. We are proud to say, it’s the only one like it.

We very soon realized that we had more work than we could handle. As a result, day to day business details were being missed. We needed someone to make sure we didn’t miss the details that might trip us up and keep our business from becoming sustainable. At first we used a young lady who was helping me with a nonprofit venture but she needed more of a full time job than we could offer. At that point, my daughter Kari was thinking about getting back into the work world after having had her second child so we asked her if she was interested in working for us part-time to manage our business. She quickly learned what we were doing and it wasn’t long before she stepped in full time and started taking on clients of her own. The fourth partner in what is now Culture By Choice joined the team. I’ll begin telling part 2 of this story tomorrow.