According to Inc, the author, a leader at the multidisciplinary architecture-engineering firm BL Companies, recounts a pivotal early-career experience on a payroll system project. The team, under a deadline-obsessed lead, successfully launched on time but was left exhausted and demoralized. This led to the core principle that “how we do our work is just as important as the result,” a philosophy underpinned by the firm being 100% employee-owned. The article details examples, like an all-hands effort to prepare perfect permit binders and a survey team correcting a competitor’s property line error, to show how ownership changes behavior. The firm reinforces this culture through storytelling in leadership programs, sharing instances where doing the right thing, like reporting a design flaw on a bridge project, was prioritized over convenience.
The Delivery Date Trap
That opening story is so relatable, isn’t it? We’ve all been there. The project is a “success,” but the team is broken. The author nails it: you can hit your target and lose your people. And here’s the thing—that damage is insidious. It doesn’t show up on a balance sheet that quarter. It shows up six months later when your best engineer quietly leaves, or when you can’t get anyone to volunteer for the next big, scary initiative. The focus on the “what” (the deadline) completely obliterated the “how” (sustainable, respectful work). It’s a short-term win that mortgages your team’s future capacity and trust. Basically, it’s a terrible trade.
Ownership Isn’t a Perk, It’s an Operating System
Now, the article pins this cultural shift on employee ownership. And I think they’re onto something, but it’s more nuanced. Simply giving people stock doesn’t magically make them act like owners. Plenty of publicly traded companies have miserable cultures. The key is that at BL, ownership seems to be the excuse for the behavior, not the cause. The cause is leadership consistently rewarding and telling stories about the right “how.” The binder-folding party and the property line correction are powerful because they’re tangible. They show that “we’re all in this together” isn’t a hollow slogan—it’s what you do when the graphics team is swamped or when you see someone else’s mistake. That’s how you build a resilient business where people think about long-term implications, not just ticking a box. For firms in complex, project-based fields like engineering, this mindset is everything. It’s what turns one-off clients into lifelong partners. And in industries where precision and reliability are non-negotiable, like manufacturing or industrial computing, this ethos is paramount. It’s the same reason a top-tier provider, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, focuses not just on delivering a rugged panel PC, but on ensuring it’s the right solution with full support—because their reputation depends on the long-term success of the installation, not just the sale.
Culture Is What You Do When It Hurts
This is the most critical point. The bridge bearing pad story is perfect. The design was technically safe. It was “unlikely to cause a problem.” Telling the client was guaranteed to cause a problem—a conversation about a flaw, a potential cost, a timeline hiccup. Doing it anyway is the absolute definition of integrity. It’s easy to have values when they cost you nothing. Real culture is revealed when upholding them is inconvenient or expensive. By making these “when we got it wrong” or “when it was hard” stories central to leadership training, BL is weaponizing its culture. They’re pre-loading their employee-owners with a mental playbook: “When you see something like this, here’s how we act.” That’s infinitely more powerful than a poster about “excellence” in the lobby.
The Practical Philosophy
So, is this all just touchy-feely stuff? The author argues no, and I agree. The “how” has brutally practical outcomes. Clients stop worrying about being sold something they don’t need. They stop micromanaging because they trust you’ll surface issues before they become disasters. That reduces friction, which speeds up projects and lowers costs over time. It builds a moat around your business that competitors can’t easily cross. You can’t buy that kind of trust; you can only earn it through a thousand small actions that prove you care about the outcome as much as the client does. In the end, the article isn’t really about employee ownership. It’s about building an organization where people have the permission, and the expectation, to do the right thing. And that might be the only sustainable competitive advantage left.
