by Guest Blogger Liam O'Duibhir, Director of SoccerFit (www.soccerfit.com.au)

Mantra, mission statement, battlecry, credo, core value...call 'em what you like, but almost every company, startup or established, big or small, at some point tries to define 'the thing' that makes them tick, some fundamental principle that above all else informs key decision-making. On the face of it, it sounds a little crazy...why would you strip down all of the information at your disposal and the complexity of a given set of circumstances to, instead, apply some 'throwaway' piece of wisdom seemingly extracted from the ether. But it seems to work. Many companies attribute great significance to their mission statement, or some variation of it, as it epitomises the company culture and points the way forward in times of uncertainty.

At StartUp Camp, it may be a little early in the scheme of things to invest time on deciding your company mantra, but it might be something to keep in the back of your head...what is this venture about...and what kind of culture do we need to make it a success. As an exercise, if you can, try get your team to brainstorm for at least 5 minutes on what the company mantra could or should be. You may be amazed at the degree to which it can give you a clear and concise understanding of the purpose and desired outcomes of the proposed venture.

To help with this process...I provide some samples from well-known and not so well-known companies, and individuals, that might nudge the thought process along  :-

• Focus or Fail - has a particularly strong message for entrepreneurs who, generally speaking, have 100s, even 1000s of ideas whirring round in their brains at any one time potentially stealing precious attention away from the one good core money-making idea that will drive the business to success. This mantra, I note, is invoked on occasion by some of the seniors at the Pollenizer group who do some fantastic entrpreneurship promotional and co-investment work in Sydney.
• Build products that people lust after  and Don't F**k the customer -  these emanate from the Atlassian core values kitbag and as best I can determine, definitely inform and define the culture and decision-making of that company. They have, I understand, no sales staff to speak of, and yet in few short years, they have become Australia's largest net exporter of software products.
• Get rich slowly - is the catch-cry from no less a light than Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha and deemed to be the World's richest man (to the nearest several billion or so).
• Don't do evil - Probably one of the most famous company mantras ever. It was included in a list of 10 core value principles drafted in the early days of Google and has caught the public imagination to an enormous degree ever since.
• Work on the business not in the business - an aphorism that is used widely by many entrepreneurs to spur them to extract themselves from the daily grind of the business to devote suitable time to the big picture initiatives that will ultimately define a successful direction for the organisation. Easy to say, but often very difficult to do in practice

My own personal mantra in business is 'Build long-term relationships' and I like to think this is broad-ranging enough to incorporate some of the positive points from the other mantras discussed.

Of course, the flipside of a company mantra is that, they can be contradicted quite easily by a potentially opposite and equal 'anti-mantra'. Take any of the above themes, for example, 'Focus or fail', can be faced off against the almost equally persuasive 'Diversify or die'. Or in the case of Google's 'Don't do evil', perhaps the Gordon Gecko quote (albeit from a fictional character) 'Greed is good', it could be suggested, upends that. So where does that leave you...perhaps the lesson is to choose your mantra wisely and accept that sometimes it may well just be the wrong consideration at any given decisive moment.

If you do come up with a colourful or inspiring mantra at StartUp camp, please share it with us, or better still, emblazon it on all of your group tee-shirts.

Enjoy SUCC II.