Ken Wilcox knows the importance of keeping employees creatively engaged.

Wilcox: The two most important ingredients from my perspective in motivating employees to stay ahead of the competition are these. First of all, we go out of our way to hire highly conscientious people, people that drive themselves. I don’t think that anybody stays at SVB who isn’t inherently conscientious. Our folks work really hard but not because anybody tells them to, simply because they want to. The second factor, though, in motivating your employees to stay ahead of the competition is culture. The kind of culture that you build will make all the difference in the world in terms of whether or not your employees work hard to stay ahead of the competition. The two most important aspects of any company are strategy and culture. And I would say under any circumstances, culture trumps strategy. By culture, what I mean is the common understanding that you build among your employees around the way they treat each other, and the way they treat their clients. You could also describe culture as values, a set of values that you mean, that you live, that you not just talk about but you also exhibit on a daily basis and that people will identify with or not, sign up for or not, and that will either cause people to stay in your corporation or because they can’t identify, move on.