Like a month after the idea of Needish came up, and before we even had a company, and even further from having employees and money and not even close to having anyone interested in reading our business plan I wrote one. There is nothing more stimulating (and important) than going through "old" documents to understand the progress, the "whys" and to always try to benchmark yourself. I am so glad no one ever read that Business Plan, because it is really not that good... but there are some really "cute" parts.

Like this one! Three guys who are still working in other projects knowing that Needish is nothing but a dream... yet already defining the framework for the Corporate Culture in Chapter 2 of the Business Plan. Its cute and I laugh and blush when I read it and it obviously should NOT have been a part of the first Business Plan (any advanced BS should be left out)... but I must say - after all - that we have implemented exactly what we said we would. And its working fine.

(By the way... Do I have to add that our BPs are ALWAYS WAY (!) TOO LONG?)

Extract from BP, February 2007:

Corporate Culture

Common Goal Leadership

All three of us, the founders of NEEDISH are young, and two of us come from Sweden, a country with a strong culture of decentralized “common goal” leadership. In authoring this Business Plan we have tried to find a good known expression for the leadership we wish to execute but in the end we choose to define our own:

The common goal leadership

In the model of a common goal leadership no manager needs to be an operational manager giving orders on a daily basis. Leadership – however formal – will be executed in an informal way using common goals as tools for decision-making. The challenge of the management is to break down the corporate mission to goals for all employees in different positions and in different times. When understanding those goals all employees will know how to act in a given situation (taken for granted our employees follow the profile described in the next chapter – people). Not knowing where the company is going we see as one of the major obstacles for growing in a Company where all employees must be intelligent, have a strong will, a creative mind, and a respectful and humble way of being.

A normal way of implementing a modern and respectful management is by making managers of people with deep knowledge and an extensive experience. That is a good way of creating informal and natural leadership; the more you know the more people will respect you.

In NEEDISH many people will be young, including the founders. Knowledge and experience often comes with age and therefore informal knowledge-based management is not applicable nor do we think it will give the best result. The most critical part of NEEDISH, as we see it, is developing something that still doesn’t exist in the market, at least not exactly they way we would like it to be. Hence, there is no knowledge and experience in the market on how to launch NEEDISH successfully. NEEDISH as an idea, and as a market-strategy is made up of different goals from different areas (implicit and explicit) like:

• Our brand must be recognized as a place where wishes come true
• The product must be quick, reliable and interesting
• Vendors must be provided with Tools so that they can gain revenue without much effort

All more or less pronounced goals we have with NEEDISH are numerous and they all aim for one thing; to reach corporate objectives and in the long run the corporate mission. What we need in order to get there has everything to do with those goals and those goals are now a part of the management’s spirit. Therefore our major mission as managers will be to communicate those goals to our employees. If we successfully manage to do so we will reach a situation in which NEEDISH is a slim, quick and creative organisation where formal leadership will be less necessary than in other companies.

NEEDISH will have a culture where:

1) People work together for common goals

2) Everyone is everyone’s leader when necessary

3) Learning by doing is more important than asking before executing

People

We will keep this chapter short. Finding the people we need is hard, describing them is easy. We need to find the following attributes in men and women we hire:

Intelligent

Relevant knowledge and experience

Creative

Self-motivated

Honest

NEEDISH-minded

NEEDISH is a company where the human asset is of critical importance and we need to continue working the common-profile of all our employees.

Open and Honest

We believe that people are good and we believe that problems with an open honest organisation are insignificant compared to the problems with a more strict, secret and controlling culture. We are all open and honest which Needish-investors will notice during this process of raising funds. We know our strengths and our weaknesses and we have no reason to hide neither or. We will expect the same from any party related to NEEDISH, be it an employee, a venture capitalist, a partner or a member of our board.