Why?

Football season kicked off this weekend and while it may officially be Fall in the rest of the country it’s still Summer in Los Angeles. The thermometer never lies, and last weekend the needle crept north of 90 two days in a row. Autumn may already be here–it’s just not evenly distributed.

I escaped the heat wave by spending most of the weekend in and around the pool at my brother’s house. Proper pool lounging requires a good book, so I perused the bookshelf for options. I decided upon “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies” by Jim Collins, a business book about some of the most revered companies in American history. In it, Collins compares a handful of these superstar companies to their competitors to see what these most successful companies had in common.

One of the lessons that really stood out to me was that most of these visionary companies did not start out with a wildly successful product or a brilliant, charismatic leader. Instead, they were built around a core value, something that they believed in so deeply that everything else became secondary. By keeping their eyes focused on their core value these companies have endured and succeeded for decades, much longer than the lifecycle of any particular product or CEO. This advice is echoed in one of my favorite TED Talks: Start With Why by Simon Sinek. If you begin with determining why your business exists then questions about how the business operates and what it produces are merely implementation details.

This got me thinking about our core value at Lux Virtual, and I’ll try to summarize it here: We make hard things easy to understand. We help people communicate complex ideas clearly and succinctly. We believe that there are a lot of great ideas out there that don’t spread quickly enough because they are not being communicated in simple terms that most people can grasp. The mission of Lux Virtual is not to advertise but to inform; not to entertain but to educate. We translate ideas from the realm of science and engineering into the language of graphics and animation–a common language intelligible to all. Our yardstick for success is hearing these words: “Aha…I get it now. I never understood that before.”

This core value extends into the way we do business as well. We strive for honesty and integrity in all of our dealings. We seek to bring light (lux) to murky subject matter, and we can’t do that if we are acting shady. We try to communicate our client’s ideas with clarity and our communication with clients must also be clear. We believe that good ideas are intrinsically valuable so we treat our clients’ ideas with the respect, regard, and confidentiality that they deserve.

We always want to be ahead of the curve technologically, using the most advanced tools available to help our clients tell their story. But whether it’s graphics, animation, video, or (soon) virtual reality we recognize that these are just tools in our tool-belt. At the end of the day what matters to us the most is unleashing great ideas by communicating them clearly and concisely.