Bobby Aitkenhead

Accountability. Not as a value you put on a slide – the actual thing, where someone has to fully own actions and results, and figure out what comes next. I played national team and semi-professional basketball. You miss a pass you should have made or miss a shot you should have scored... and you end up losing a game. You don't get to go home and process it quietly. You sit in that locker room and close that chapter together, as a team. Everyone knows what went wrong. The question is whether you can discuss and overcome as a team, or the culture is to ignore, quietly assign fault, and move on. At A.GAIN, I've worked to build the culture that discusses failure to overcome as a unit, and not have failure dealt with – or assigned – individually. It's harder than it sounds and more important than almost anything else. In our business, we win together, we fail together, period.

Whether it holds when everything becomes difficult.

The ones that are hard and meaningful. The ones where the stakes are high and very real, and there's no obviously right answer. The ones where the most prepared, discipline, and hardest working teams normally win. When a company needs a creative solution or a difficult negotiation; a resilient position or a flexible one. When leadership changes (or needs change), when capital is restructured, or when independent thinking and first principles matter most. Being unconventional and breaking from traditional constraints. Making that hard call, being first to take the difficult stance. I’m fine with being in that situation. I'd rather be there and take the shot than find out later that nobody said what needed to be said or did what needed to be done.