Mike’s Principles of Management

“In the most basic sense, a successful business is one in which revenue is greater than expenses. It is very easy to create expenses and harder to create revenue, and to have revenue exceed expenses is harder still.” Mike Morey, Co-founder of CityPASS

A few years ago, when CityPASS had been around for over 15 years, and had well exceeded the projected life span and success for a start-up small business, our President and CEO, Megan Allen, said that our past was vital to our future. The values, business approaches, and climate of CityPASS are different from many other companies, and she felt we should formalize these through expressions of our purpose and core values. She wanted our co-founder Mike Gallagher and me to share our story with the goal of making these values a permanent part of CityPASS’ culture and future.

I made a list of principles that I had learned in school, business, and life which I had applied in managing organizations including CityPASS. I have applied these in businesses, nonprofits, as a non-profit board member, and on government committees. This was not an actionable list that I set out to employ from the very beginning of my career. In fact, some with whom I have worked much earlier in my career could rightfully say that I missed a few of these principles in my interactions with them (for which I apologize). Instead, these are principles I have developed over time, from seeing what works and does not work in the business sense, and observing the wonderful human element that is always with us and has more to do with success and happiness than the best business plan, although you do need a plan, at least in your head.

I then added a few words of explanation to each principle and circulated this list among our employees. And like any endeavor of this nature, I continued to think about it and would add to the explanations and even add new principles to our mutual amusement (Staff would ask “Do I have the latest version?”) and send out the updated version of what we called Mike’s Principles of Management.