Remove the Noise, Protect the Hours, Ship the Work

By Tom Nault, CEO, Hudson Cloud Systems

I’ve never liked meaningless company slogans. “Do what you love in the service of those who love what you do.” It’s a meaningless word pretzel. Another one: “The Quiet Company.” Okay. The series Silicon Valley made fun of meaningless corporate slogans and it was a running joke throughout the show. The whole “Making the World a Better Place” was later, “We’re making the world a better place… through scalable, distributed, cloud-optimized solutions.” Of course, it means absolutely nothing. I asked GPT-5.1 to give me a list of bad ones and good ones. First the bad.

Here are a pile of meaningless slogans actually used:

• Driving transformation through holistic alignment

• Leveraging scalable solutions for a dynamic future

• Disrupting paradigms with next-generation impact

• Unlocking human potential through integrated ecosystems

• Delivering customer-centric value that moves the needle

• Enabling frictionless collaboration across verticals

• Building a smarter future through agile co-creation

• Aligning strategy and execution for breakthrough outcomes

• Orchestrating cross-functional synergies within an adaptive paradigm

• Accelerating future-ready optimization in a boundaryless enterprise

• Amplifying holistic stakeholder alignment through transformational bandwidth

• Cultivating multi-vector value streams for sustained hypergrowth

• Unifying mission-critical operational touchpoints across the innovation horizon

They all make me groan. Don’t you just want to fire the whole team who came up with these? They all just scream internal dysfunction and a lack of competence. I can’t even imagine sitting around and feeling proud of any of these.

I asked GPT-5.1 to come up with some good ones that companies use and they are at the end of this post. Some are classics.

The purpose of this post is to tell you the story about how we came up with ours. It’s actually a direct reflection of our company founder, Behan Venter or CTO, and years of conversations we’ve had about what we do and why. It reminds me so much of him.

I was explaining to GPT-5.1 how we work individually in reference to adherence to our culture and to make sure we never lose sight of what matters to us. I was working on some company planning as we think about the coming year.

We tend to be very results-driven as an organization and we’re manic about it, out of character. This is why we’re working together in the first place. This is how I always thought of Behan and Leon, our COO/CFO, over the last dozen years or so. You will find us working at almost any hour of the day or night, and we’re not fans of bullshit by character. We were talking about our work long before I joined the company.

We can be overly blunt with each other at times, but it’s always with this idea of being the best at something. Nothing is ever good enough with any of us and we’re always looking at doing something better. You should see us examine paint on an exotic car!

Buried in a comment when GPT-5.1 was summarizing my conversation, it said, “…we remove the noise, protect the hours, ship the work, got it!” I said “yes” and moved on to the other points GPT-5.1 made, and then it hit me. That one sentence summarized who we are better than anything I could have set out to write if my intention was to create a slogan in the first place. It was right under our nose.

Remove the Noise

Out of experience growing other companies, I’ve been very fussy about keeping back channels of communication from growing at Hudson Cloud as a result of weak direct channels. I’m encouraging everyone to have direct, hard conversations without anyone acting as a broker of information, especially at this stage of our growth. Generally we do that well, but it’s always a concern as I’ve witnessed other companies with two distinct org structures: the one everyone sees and one behind the curtain that nobody sees.

Keeping it out of a company from the onset can help build a much better company in the long run. It’s also how you keep gaslighting that often occurs between employees to a minimum. It’s sometimes referred to as “water cooler talk.”

We also tend to be very blunt about what we see that works and doesn’t work. We’re about direct action and not a lot of fluff in how we talk to each other. We do everything with the focus on hard results and not intentions. If someone brings me a problem, we get it addressed on the spot.

Protect the Hours

This line is pointed in two directions. One is with regard to the efficiency we create for our customers, and the other is how we look for efficiency in everything we do. With the addition of AI and AI-based tools we’re able to do more and manage more with a much smaller team. This also makes us far more cost-effective and responsive for our existing customers. None of us, as a part of our culture, likes to waste time.

This idea of keeping our efficiency very high is what makes it such a fun place to work. We don’t waste hours in pointless meetings. We could book an hour and be done in five minutes. We rarely take more time than we absolutely need.

Ship the Work

This line is probably my favorite because it reminds me so much of Behan and the quality of our work. We saw it with a flawless build of the Albuquerque campus that opened on time and on budget, and it came to life without a hiccup. We also did a complete migration off of Citrix and onto Azure, and not a single person noticed, and it was like dismantling a spider web and putting it back together. It was that delicate. That to me was an example of shipping the work. It was perfect, thanks to the team.

We do this every time with a new customer. We are relentless about details and checking our work multiple times before it goes live. It makes me very proud to be a part of the company.

When I saw it as a slogan for the first time, I smiled and it’s now a part of my email signature. It fit like a well-worn shoe.

Some companies spend millions trying to come up with something that sounds like this. Ours showed up in a casual line written by an AI as a throwaway, and it nailed us better than anything we could have engineered deliberately.

“Remove the noise, protect the hours, ship the work.”

That’s who we are.

Here are some great slogans from other companies.

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“Here are corporate slogans that are universally considered strong. These are the opposite of jargon: they’re anchored in mission, identity, or a promise customers can actually understand.

1. Purpose-Driven, Clear, and Memorable

These set the tone for the entire company, not a product line.

“We try harder.” – Avis

Maybe the greatest corporate slogan ever written.

Honest. Competitive. Zero fluff.

“The relentless pursuit of perfection.” – Lexus

Corporate culture distilled into one sentence.

“The happiest place on earth.” – Disney

Not a product. A worldview.

“Connecting people.” – Nokia

Before smartphones existed, this was perfect.

“Think.” – IBM (original)

Corporate minimalism before minimalism was cool.

2. Value-Forward, Not Buzzword-Forward

These tell the customer what the company does, not how it feels about itself.

“The customer is always right.” – Marshall Field’s

Corporate doctrine disguised as a slogan.

“We bring good things to life.” – GE

A statement of impact, not self-congratulation.

“Performance with purpose.” – PepsiCo

Corporate responsibility in four words that aren’t self-righteous.

“The power to do more.” – Dell

Simple, directional, human.

3. Corporate Personality (Not Corporate Jargon)

These work because they have a point of view.

“Move fast and break things.” – Facebook (early)

A cultural ethos more than a slogan.

“Don’t be evil.” – Google

Provocative, memorable, and ethical (ironically).

“Fail harder.” – Wieden+Kennedy

A creative firm telling the world how they think.

“Ideas for life.” – Panasonic

Warm, human, direct.

4. B2B Corporate Slogans That Don’t Suck

This category is the hardest because 99 percent of it is garbage (“Empowering tomorrow’s value ecosystems”).

These are the rare good ones:

“Intel inside.” – Intel

Corporate, B2B, but perfect.

“We deliver.” – UPS (historic slogan)

Says exactly what they do and promises reliability.

“The world on time.” – FedEx

A corporate promise in four words.

“The network is the computer.” – Sun Microsystems

Bold, visionary, and absolutely true (in hindsight).

5. The Un-corporate Corporate Slogans

These succeed because they feel real, not manufactured.

“In search of excellence.” – McKinsey (informal motto)

A mission that became an identity.

“Democracy dies in darkness.” – The Washington Post

Not corporate jargon. A statement of purpose.

“Quality is our recipe.” – Wendy’s

Corporate but straightforward.”

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