LinkedIn Lessons: Know where you're going
My first post on LinkedIn's publishing platform, "The Value of a Corporate True North" focused on the importance and impact that LinkedIn has enjoyed from having established a core, guiding principle for the company. “Members First” is LinkedIn's first principle and true north, and it has been critical in helping focus our efforts. It will continue to guide our actions and activities as we extend our member value and build our lines of business.
For this second post I will continue on the theme of sharing lessons learned during my tenure at the company. While reflecting on the path we have been on, I am reminded that during the growth and evolution of the company, consistent clarity about where we were going helped us manage and develop the business during times of hyper-growth.
Defining The Summit
Once LinkedIn product and value proposition became clear and members began to adopt the service, the company's mission statement was created to codify where we were headed:
Connect the World's professionals to make them more productive and successful
Here’s a closer look and deconstruction of the statement:
Connect: Connection is a powerful foundational element of the LinkedIn experience. Connecting our members with other members, to relevant and important opportunities, and to insights about their industry and profession supports our desire to help transform our members' careers.
World: We are and have been focused on serving a global audience and we are guided by the view that it is important to serve a global audience and facilitate connections on a global and massive scale.
Professional: We have been focused on the professional use case and believe that our members value the separation of professional and social networking, and appreciate this singular focus and professional context. While deviating from this core and offering personal and entertaining functionality might have served a short-term objective of increasing engagement, it would have betrayed our mission.
Productive and Successful: Ultimately our success is measured by our ability to drive greater productivity and success of our members as we connect them with a range of professional opportunities. In addition to maintaining a professional context, we have focused on establishing and maintaining a strong signal to noise ratio around the functionality and activities of the site, and we have avoided creating functionality meant simply to drive engagement and time on site.
LinkedIn's mission has enabled us to stay focused on providing value for our 277 million members, and it has also served as a rallying point for our employees. Talent has been LinkedIn's top internal priority, and our mission has been very helpful in both inspiring prospective employees to join us and keeping current employees highly motivated. Aaron Levie, CEO of Box considers a related idea in his thoughtful piece titled "Be on a mission that does not suck."
While some think that we have successfully reached the summit that we saw many years ago, we know that we are merely at base camp on our way to the next summit. Today LinkedIn is at an exciting point in its evolution as we embark on an ambitious and exciting undertaking to construct the economic graph, captured within the following vision:
Digitally mapping the global economy to connect talent with opportunity at massive scale
In the words of our CEO Jeff Weiner, and described in his post "The Future of LinkedIn and the Economic Graph," our long term goal is to develop the world's first economic graph. The vision of the economic graph is exciting and big, it is a worthy undertaking that doesn't suck. Furthermore, the opportunity to even pursue this important and bold vision is based upon our success executing against our original mission.