Two things happened this week to prompt me writing this.
A post on brand values did the rounds. I opened it hoping for an obituary but instead it told me which words to use, which to avoid and that the craft lay in choosing them well.
Pur-lease.
Then a company whose five core values include ‘Intellectual Honesty’ (“seek truth, learn from mistakes, share learnings”), saw its founder tell staff he had been unfaithful to his wife then watched shareholders file a suit alleging the company’s statements about the affair had misled them.
The craft left the words a while ago because, guess what, words now mean nothing in relation to what a brand stands for.
Any model will write you five values in four seconds, and they’ll be fine. That’s the point. When all the words in the world are cheap (free), the only thing that still costs anything is actually DOING them.
It’s actions that build belief, words only describe it.
The evidence has been in for years. In a study of nearly 700 large companies, MIT Sloan School of Management found more than 80% publish an official set of values and no correlation, on average, between what’s published and how well it’s practised day to day.
And people don’t live by a list anyway, they arrive with values of their own.
For the first time, fewer than half of England and Wales call themselves Christian; more than a third have no religion at all; some people have a faith, some have none; some come with politics and perspective central to their view, socio-economic background or culture or even several identities at once.
Then what, a business hands them five nouns and asks them to believe?
No.
A business isn’t a church and no one should be in the business of cementing their values onto the people who work for them or the people they serve.
At Industry Unlimited Strategy Studio we don’t write values. Haven’[t for a long time. We help clients and their brands set precedents. We help write and codify the belief in the pricing, the hiring, the returns policy and the Monday meeting. All the places it can be experienced (not recited).
A precedent asks nobody to believe anything. It’s a decision that governs the next decision. Things like: “Anyone can refund up to £50 without asking.” Or “We tell the customer before they find out.”
In our own studio: the person who did the thinking gets their name on the work and is paid first. No poster on the wall. Those are the terms and the terms are the culture because living brands don’t live by a list of values. They live in who gets promoted, what gets forgiven and what happens on a bad day.
So next time someone asks for your values, show them your returns policy.
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Our ENGINE ROOM business transformation sprint, turns what a business already believes into what it does next. Precedents, not values.
