Core Values @ BeMo

Our Purpose:

To help students achieve their academic and career goals and to keep admissions fair to everyone regardless of their social, cultural or racial status.

Our Core Values:

1. High standards

• We only hire the very best, keep only those that are highly effective, and let everyone else go, with respect. (Test for managers: is everyone on your team the best possible person for their specific roles? If you did not immediately say “yes”, let them go, today, with respect.)
• We only want to provide the very best to our students; we are focused on them not on ourselves, or our competitors.
• If we see room for improvement, we immediately get to work.
• Everything we do, we turn to gold. We only perform to the highest standards possible.
• We often go above and beyond.
• We are modest and always eager to learn independent of our educational or professional background/experiences.
• We seek self-improvement in our personal and professional lives.

2. Integrity & respect

• We are honest and open at all times in our communications.
• We openly discuss our opinion with all team members.
• We only say things about other team members we feel comfortable saying to their face.
• We treat everyone with respect even during times of disagreement.
• Some organizations might like to hire the “oddball” who is arrogant and rude to everyone because they do great work, but that’s not us. We only have team members that have respect for others AND do great work.

3. Advocate

• We are advocates for fair and scientific candidate selection.
• We understand the consequences of inappropriate candidate selection.
• We recognize that we have a social responsibility to advocate for the marginalized.
• We intervene if someone is being marginalized.

4. Nothing is impossible

• Being a pioneer. We embrace new technologies.
• We come up with brand new ideas and share novel ideas at all times.
• We always want to do things that haven’t been done before, even if that means a drastic change in the way we do things here at BeMo; as long as the potential of long-term benefits to BeMo and those we serve outweigh the disadvantages.
• We think long term and we understand that nothing great can be done overnight because “Rome wasn’t built in one day.” We take our time to plan our path to long-term goals then we implement one step at a time and relentlessly. 
• Science-based innovation. We don’t do anything willy-nilly. We test, analyze and then make decisions about our directions and products/services at BeMo.
• We remove complexity to make things simple for us and our students.
• We are curious and make connections that others miss.
• We are courageous and we take smart risks and open to possible failure.
• We challenge the status quo – we avoid the phrase “because it’s always been done like that”.
• We make decisions deliberately but quickly and implement with lightening speed.

5. Selflessness:

• We seek what’s best for BeMo and the team, rather than what’s best for ourselves as individuals.
• We are eager and available to help colleagues.

6. Manager – freedom and responsibility

• We are a team of managers.
• We work at our highest level whether or not someone is “supervising” us.
• We thrive in times of ambiguity.
• We are self-directed learners, if we don’t know something we immediately search for answers.
• If something is broke we fix it and we implement a long term, permanent solution, without having to wait for someone to ask us.
• We don’t believe in ranks and rules.
• The only time we follow “rules” is when we are providing context to new team members, through training or written SOPs.
• We plan in advance and anticipate possible problems.
• We own the responsibility to our projects and if we believe we can’t make it, we seek help in advance to make sure we reach our milestones with the help of others.
• We are not afraid to reverse our decisions later if evidence suggests that we were “wrong”.

7. Communication

• We communicate with everyone openly and candidly.
• We avoid excuses, or ambiguous talk or being “political”.
• We listen first and seek to understand before we speak.
• We provide honest and timely feedback to other team members.

8. Collaboration

• We collaborate as a team to make great things happen that wouldn’t be possible without the help of others.
• We seek to understand other cultures and backgrounds.
• We appreciate that we all have our biases and we work to grow past them.

9. Details are everything

• We take notes like (mad) scientists.
• We follow the SOPs. This is especially important for new team members.
• We pay attention to the details of our colleagues’ communications before responding.

10. We follow the 80/20 rule

• We pay 80% of our attention to the 20% of things that make the most impact.
• For example, we solve recurring problems with long-term protocols, but we don’t worry too much about a problem that happens once a year.
• We don’t sweat the 80% of things that don’t make a huge impact on our operations, our image or the services we provide. E.g. we don’t sweat typos in internal documents as long as they are comprehensible, although we seek to fix such errors if we are making other major improvements to such documents.