The last two weeks I wrote about our Mission and our Vision.  This blog is about our Values.

1. Mission
2. Vision
3. Values
4. Goals
5. Guiding Principals
6. Strategies

We have five Core Values at ‘The Tree’.  Here they are, and a little about each one.  What’s important for us to remember is that our Core Values are the primary standards for doing business.  These values direct our judgements and the decision for what is important for us to do if we are to fulfill our Vision.  These are different from our principles that I will write about in a couple weeks.

1. Passion for our purpose:  There may be no stronger emotion than passion. Passion is that barely controllable emotion we have all had, create by a very strong desire for something. Often the something is our partner, a sport, our kids, or to just flat achieve a goal. But at Solution Tree our passion is for our purpose, or our mission.  Advance the work of our authors.  If we do not have passion for our purpose/mission, then we can NEVER EVER accomplish our Vision of Transforming education worldwide to ensure learning for all.
2. Dedication to quality: I would put our quality up against anybody’s!  And I mean that with all sincerity.  Product Development: Nobody in our sector of education does more developmental work with an author to make certain their work is articulated in the most productive way possible.  Professional Development:  There is not a better more monitored system in education than the one Shannon Ritz and her team have built in PD.  Our software is customized and intense!  We screen and educate all of our presenters on best practice.  We evaluate each and every PD event (3,000+ annually), and share the evals with the presenters.  We live the phrase continuous improvement.  Events:  There is not a better run event business than Solution Tree’s.  We have a STEM (Solution Tree Event Management) tool that walks us step by step through everything that needs to be done for an event.  When it needs to happen, who is responsible, who is the process handed off to next, and so on.  It beginning with the event concept approval to the AAR (After Action Review).   Evaluations are collected at every session and shared with the presenters within an hour of their last presentation.  No that is immediate feedback.
3. Develop individual potential: This not only means helping our Authors and Associates reach their potential, but also our staff.  We challenge, encourage and help them reach their goals.  This is something that can not be perfected, because I don’t believe that very many of us really know what our potential truly is, but I do know that none of us can reach it without help.
4. Profitable growth:  We can easily have growth at the expense of profits.  But then we would be looking for jobs as Solution Tree.  We can Increase profits by cutting expenses to dangerous levels, by not caring about all the quality measures we have establish and enforce, but then our priorities would be out of order and we would not be taking care of our duties to advance the work of our Authors, and also ignoring Value #2.
5. Integrity – period:  The period says it all.

So those are our Values.  They were identified and articulated with great thought and care, and they can never be forgotten or neglected.

As I posted last week, we’ve entered into our 17th year of leading Solution Tree (formerly National Educational Service, founded in 1987), and it is once again important to understand who we are, what we do, how we do it, why we do it and where we are heading.  Last week I wrote about our Mission.  This blog is about our Vision.

1. Mission
2. Vision
3. Values
4. Goals
5. Guiding Principals
6. Strategies

These blogs are primarily written for the Solution Tree Staff, Authors and Associates.  We have a growing company with many new Authors, and like any company that hires a lot of young people, we have a good amount of turnover. So the intent here is to help keep us all on track.

Vision: The ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom.  A vivid mental image of what the future could be.

Transform education worldwide to endure learning for all.

Now that’s ambitious, and yes it is possible.  I believe, we believe, in our heart of hearts that Solution Tree is as capable as anyone organization in the world to transform education. For a couple of basic reasons:

1. Our Mission Statement make us unique.  We are author-centric.  We publish the best and the brightest.  Their strategies, applications and innovations work!
2. All of our authors’ work can be bridged together to build a unique school improvement plan for a variety of unique school scenarios.
3. Our Authors and Associates customize plans for schools.  We don’t own a cookie cutter!
4. The Solution Tree staff is THE BEST STAFF IN THE WORLD at helping Authors and Educators.
5. The US is looked at as the foundational education country for K-12 innovation.  Other countries may have higher scores in some areas, and different graduation statistics, but we are all fighting the exact same fight, so why not collaborate and figure out what works. That is why we are now co-publishing in five other countries and distributing in another 14.  And we’re just warming up.
6. “If not us, who? If not now, when?” A regular quote from Becky DuFour when I am luck enough to be her doubles tennis partner, and we are starting another comeback.  Her quote certainly applies here!

This is why we do what we do.  I can get all soft, mushy and passionate here when I think about my own kids, but there is no greater asset than our students.  There is nothing more important for us to do collectively, and world wide, than to give our children the best education possible.  It truly is life or death.

As we enter into our 17th year of leading Solution Tree (formerly National Educational Service, founded in 1987) it is important to reflect and understand who we are, what we do, how we do it, why we do it and where we are heading.  in the next six blogs I will address:

1. Mission
2. Vision
3. Values
4. Goals
5. Guiding Principals
6. Strategies

These blogs are primarily written for the Solution Tree Staff, Authors and Associates but will give anyone interested a look into the heart of Solution Tree.  We have a growing company with many new Authors, and like any company that hires a lot of young people, we have a good amount of turnover. So there are a good number of Treedwellers who aren’t well versed on these six topics.

On August 15, 2013 I wrote about our Mission and on August 23rd I wrote about our Vision.  I am writing the next two blogs on the same topic without reading the old blogs first to make certain that I have a consistent understanding.

Here we go.

Solution Tree has a very simple Mission Statement.  Advance the work of our authors. But maybe not quite as simple to execute.  Let me break our Mission into three important themes.

1. Advance – It is our job to take the intellectual property submitted to us in a manuscript, help the author develop it through our very detailed developmental editing process, produce a high quality product and get it into the hands of educators who need that particular solution to help them.  We then book speaking engagements for our authors, interactive video consulting sessions, build an Associate pool to support their speaking demands, create on-line courses, make DVDs, get the author on stage at our events and other events, etc.   Anything we can do to get their work exposed, advanced.
2. Work – We are advancing the work not the author.  And we do not produce work or programs that are not directly attached to our authors.  Many authors become quite well known and the demand for them as individuals is often high, but we can not forget that for Solution Tree, it is about their work.  We will always tie their work directly to the them, but again, we advance the work.  We want the work to remain effective long after all of us are out fishing, golfing and complaining about the government full time.
3. Our Authors – We get a lot of request to book speakers at our events, or to have them included in some sort of speakers bureau they think we may have.  But unless we publish the book we do not promote the book.  We book only our Authors and the Associates chosen by them them to represent their work through us.  My opinion is that if an author wants to publish with another company, and that is certainly fine, then they deserve the support that publisher provides not the quality support we provide.

EVERYTHING we do at Solution Tree is to “advance the work of our Authors”.  We forget this ourselves sometimes and have to reel ourselves back in, but as long as we stay true to this Mission Statement, you will see the work of some of the greatest Authors in education advanced to great and appropriate heights.  And that is ‘how’ we do what we do.