It’s impossible to find all the answers to leading a business in a magazine article — even if it’s in the Harvard Business Review. But you might find a good question once in a while.
That’s exactly what happened to Michael Rubin a couple of years ago.
The chairman, president and CEO of GSI Commerce Inc. was thumbing through an issue of the well-known management publication when he happened upon a couple of key questions that every company leader should ask their employees. One of the questions was culture-related, and it immediately stuck out to Rubin: Could you go around to every key employee in your company and ask them what your vision, mission and core values are?
“At that point, I knew my answer would be ‘no,’” Rubin says.
GSI is a growing e-commerce solutions company with a list of clients that includes Dell, Estée Lauder and the National Football League. From the outside, GSI looks the part of a company that generated $967 million in 2008 net revenue — healthy and in peak condition. But on the inside, GSI had a case of ambiguity.
The long-term vision, mission and values of the company hadn’t been explicitly defined by management. The guiding principles of the company might have been on paper somewhere, but the communication of those principles was so lacking that many of GSI’s 4,500 full-time employees would have had trouble defining them.
To Rubin, the answer was clear: GSI needed to better define and communicate the vision, mission and values that drive his company.
“We undertook a critical process, driven by our employee base and other key constituencies, to really define our vision, mission and core values,” Rubin says. “Once we implemented that, it has really helped to shape the company.”
