Early in his career, Glenn Bostock, Founder of SnapCab, relied on traditional, fear-based management tactics. When an employee made an expensive mistake on an international job, Glenn yelled at him—expecting it to enforce accountability. Instead, the employee quit, leading to higher costs and lost trust.
A shift in mindset led Glenn to drop fear and punishment entirely. The next time a major mistake happened, rather than reacting with anger, Glenn approached the situation with curiosity: How did the system fail, and how can we fix it together? He realized that a business is only as strong as the community inside it.
That shift didn’t just transform workplace morale; it led to an incoming material inspection process that saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Problems are here for your benefit. They are like going to the gym—you tear muscle to grow more muscle. A stream of problems to solve every day makes us better people.”
— Glenn Bostock
The 5 Core Principles of a Human Business
Glenn distilled 44 years of business experience into five foundational principles designed to institutionalize a caring, high-performing workplace culture:
- Create a Foundation of Caring: Replace the fear of punishment with psychological safety. When employees feel safe, they stop hiding mistakes and start solving them.
- Understand Your “Ruling Love”: Discover what truly energizes and lights up each individual on your team beyond their resume.
- Focus on Being Useful: Align what employees love doing with what the company and customer actually need.
- Embrace Problems and Weaknesses: Accept that everyone has flaws. Build teams where individual weaknesses create opportunities for others to step up and leverage their strengths.
- Model the Business After the Human Form: Treat the company like a living body. If there is a “pebble in the shoe” (a recurring operational flaw or quality defect), stop production immediately to address it rather than pushing through the pain.
SnapCab’s framework operates on three simple, practical values:
- Be Kind: Creates an environment safe enough for people to speak up when things go wrong.
- Be Authentic: Encourages honesty about what is working and what isn’t.
- Be Useful: Keeps the collective focus on serving co-workers and customers.
If you want to transition your organization from a traditional command-and-control hierarchy to a human-centered community, start with these actionable steps:
- Reward Mistake Reporting: Turn errors into learning opportunities. Implement a recognition system (such as monthly rewards, gift cards, or a prize wheel) for employees who identify and report operational defects.
- Involve Employees in “Mistake-Proofing”: Give team members dedicated time (e.g., 30–60 minutes) to help design solutions for the problems they identify, giving them ownership over continuous improvement.
- Hire for Passion Over Experience Alone: Focus interviews on discovering what candidates love doing, then align those drivers with the practical needs of the business.
- Practice Top-Down Vulnerability: Share your own missteps, ask for help, and apologize when you make life difficult for your team. Modeling vulnerability encourages employees to be authentic.
- Prioritize Usefulness Over Profit: Flip the traditional hierarchy. Put being useful to your employees and customers first—profit and a great reputation will naturally follow as side effects.
- Stop the Line for “Pebbles in the Shoe”: Empower frontline staff to pause processes when a quality issue arises so the team can swarm the problem immediately rather than letting compounding errors ruin long-term output.
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