Culture Matters: Why We Are Building the Wise Firm

I’m a huge fan of Patrick Lencioni, author of The Advantage.

Lencioni says that businesses can no longer outsmart our competition. He says the speed of technology and knowledge will not allow us to maintain a competitive advantage from being smarter. In fact, he determines in his work that the only real, long-term advantage a company can establish is a strong culture. A powerfully engaged team.

His research also shows that most company’s management spends 90% of their time working on the smart side of business (strategy, marketing, finance and technology). That was perplexing to him (and to me), since companies know that a healthy culture makes you better and can be a competitive advantage, so why don’t we work on this?

At HORNE, we do. Culture matters. 

We describe our culture as the Wise Firm©, which is our vision for the kind of firm we want to be. We work on culture every day at HORNE, actively building the kind of firm we want to work for. We make culture a priority and make the hard decisions that come with making culture a competitive advantage. It is our plan to share this blog simply to help you see what it looks like when an organization gets serious about making their culture great.  We share it, because there can never be too many great places to work. And, if you are looking for a great place to work, you can see a little behind the curtain into our construction zone.

There’s also another reason culture is the priority at HORNE. Our culture has to support every strategy we want to pursue. No strategy, no matter how great, will work if it is at odds with the culture. So culture has to be number one. I committed to our firm in 2011 that building the Wise Firm would be our focus. It has been, and it still is. We have made progress, we have made mistakes, but we keep moving forward and are building the Wise Firm together.

Building the Wise Firm brick by brick, because culture matters.

About the Author:
Joey Havens, CPA, is the executive partner at HORNE LLP, where he passionately lives out his life’s calling to help others see and reach their full potential. He is a husband, father, grandfather, avid outdoorsman, and fanatical college sports fan.