It happens to me every year. Going in, I wonder "What is there left to discuss? Are we wasting precious hours of our team's time?"
And every year I'm reassured that we're not–the 2026 Innolitics Retreat was no different. Everyone had flown into Houston the day before and was gathered in a conference room at the Marriott. I handed out paper copies of our mission and values with assorted pens I grabbed from a bag at home.
"Take fifteen minutes!" It used to make me feel awkward, sitting in silence with the full team underlining, striking out words, and drawing arrows. As the review time ends, people sheepishly look up and then back down again at their paper. Yujan and I exchange a nod, and we're off.
"Let's start with our Mission. 'Our mission is to accelerate progress in the medical device industry by providing quality services to our clients, creating tools, and sharing knowledge, with the ultimate purpose of improving patient health. We do so while providing meaningful, flexible, and financially-rewarding careers to our team.' Are we pursuing our mission? Do we need to alter it in any way?"
Mary Vater, our Director of Regulatory Affairs, brings up a good point: how about clinicians? Sometimes medical devices just make their life simpler, without improving patient health? We discuss. Doesn't helping the clinician implicitly improve patient health? We go back and forth. I mention the Nicomachean Ethics and the chain of "whys" that lead you up to the good. After recognizing that not all devices exclusively improve patient health, we decide to leave the mission unchanged, opting to sacrifice completeness for clarity.
The discussion really warms up when we get to the values:
- Put Patients First
- Take Ownership
- Focus on Value
- Continue Improving
- Communicate Effectively
Ilya, one of our engineers, talks about a time when he quoted one of our values to a client. A new hire mentions a value that resonated with them when they were deciding if they wanted to work at Innolitics. George, a consultant on our team with more than 70 clearances, shares war stories. We discuss agentic AI and how this aligns with our value to "Take Ownership" and "Focus on Value."
I feel fortunate to work with such a great team, and I love seeing how invested they are in what we do and how we do it.
Under each of our five values, we list several examples (you can see them here). The tangible output of this discussion is dozens of small changes to these examples. The real output is a team that's
- re-dedicated to our mission and values,
- better aligned on how to make difficult judgments calls,
- excited by the team's mutual investment in what we do.
