Guest Lecture from Brian Forth [TINST 475]

A week or so ago, our class had the privilege of hearing from Brian Forth from Tacoma based company "sitecrafting.com". His 3 key points were Core, Company, and Community. He discussed these 3 themes and how they related to business. For the theme of Core, he discussed being true to yourself and "Doing what you say that you will do". For his company, "sitecrafting.com" his core value is creating a company that is committed to it's employees, and keeps them til retirement. This strategy of holding onto committed employees, reflects his own personal beliefs and values. This tied into his second theme, running a company that is committed to employees and customers. Forth discussed how recently his company attempted to implement some bureaucracy into their commitment model. They did that through the addition of a JIRA ticketing system to keep track of issues and assign tasks. This almost completely collapsed their corporate culture. Some of the staff turned on each other and it could have potentially destroyed the company. I found this to be an incredibly interesting story, and it really shed light on the importance of maintaining stable corporate culture. His last theme was community, which he simply summarized as being committed to the community, not just taking from the community, but being a part of it and giving back. Overall, Mr Forth's discussion on the importance of Core, Company, and Community were incredibly insightful and fascinating. In addition to his lecture, I had the opportunity to ask a question reagrding how he got into website development. He detailed how he had always been a problem solver, finding ways to make computers work and creating/maintaining websites for small groups and organizations. -Don