Parliament: Times Consistency
About four months after we hand off a brand, there's a moment I've learned to watch for.
The founder emails to say the team loves it. The values are printed and up in the conference room. And somewhere in the same paragraph she mentions a promotion she just handed out, or a hire she just made, and it has nothing to do with anything we spent six weeks writing down.
She isn't being cynical. She's busy. The brand work happened in March and the promotion happened in July, and nothing connected the two, because nothing was built to.
Garry Ridge, who ran WD-40 for twenty-five years, has a formula I keep coming back to. Culture equals values plus behavior, times consistency. He took the first half from Simon Sinek, who got it from a retired Marine general named George Flynn, and Ridge added the multiplier himself.
The punctuation is doing all the work. Values and behavior get added together. Consistency multiplies the sum. Ridge's own line about why: "Consistency tells people this is real, not posters."
Hoot is very good at the addition.
Getting what a company actually believes out of the founder's head and into words her team can repeat without wincing, then shaping that language so the right people want in and the wrong ones quietly select themselves out. Name it to tame it. We do that well and I'll keep saying so.
The multiplier is where I get humbled. I am not a naturally consistent person. We have invented internal rituals at Hoot that I let quietly die by month two, more than once, and I run a company whose entire premise is that culture gets built on purpose.
Consistency isn't something anybody can sell you in a deliverable. It shows up in whether the hiring scorecard screens for the values you wrote down, whether the review conversation asks about them, whether the person who hit their number while torching a teammate gets promoted anyway. That's operations work and HR work and a question of leadership nerve, and it runs for years.
Here's the part I find encouraging, and I mean it structurally rather than motivationally.
A multiplier compounds. Addition gives you a sum you have to keep re-earning from scratch. Multiplication takes what's already sitting there and grows it. Every quarter the same language turns up in your onboarding, your promotion conversations, and the way you explain a hard decision, you are not starting over. You're multiplying a number that already exists. And when you drop it, which you will, you pick it back up at the number you left rather than at zero.
Nobody on your team is keeping a perfect record of you. They're checking whether the thing you said in March is still true in November.
But you cannot multiply a number that isn't there.
That's the real argument for doing the naming work first, and it's the one I'd make to any leader tempted to skip straight to systems. You can't be consistent about a belief that doesn't have words yet. You can't hold a hiring manager accountable to a value that still lives in the founder's gut. Every mechanism your ops and HR people build has to point at something specific, or they end up enforcing their own best guess, and three leaders' best guesses are never the same guess.
Which is why the alignment is the part I'd spend money on first. It's the fastest week in the whole project and the return shows up immediately, because the moment your leadership team argues from one set of words instead of three private versions of what the company stands for, every decision downstream gets cheaper.
The rest belongs to your ops lead, your HR lead, and you, for as long as the company exists. I'd love to tell you we can do that part too. We can't. What we can do is make sure the thing you spend the next several years being consistent about is worth that kind of time.
Something in your company is already being repeated every week with total consistency, whether anybody chose it or not. The multiplier doesn't ask permission. It runs on whatever's there.
We built The Brand Being Method™ for exactly this first step: who you're for, who you're not for, what you actually believe, and where your tension point lives. Download the workbook now for free.
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