Brand
Consultancy
Consultancy
We see you up there. Mounted prominently on the break room wall, doing your best to declare everything your company claims to believe in. Your oversized serif type shouts grand ideals—Integrity! Customer Service! Diversity!—for employees to glance at before grabbing a tub of day-old tuna salad from the fridge.
You’ve been hanging up there a while. So long, you probably feel more like wallpaper than inspiration. Even though “Corporate Values” is emblazoned across your top, you probably feel like your value to the corporation is, shall we say, limited.
We feel your pain, pal. And we know a better way to make your life less two-dimensional.
The problem is that values programs, and the posters like you they spawn, have fallen into a short-term trap. They no longer build real behavior that creates belief and action. Instead, they’ve become defenses of their companies’ shareholder intent—boxes a corporation feels a need to check, then broadcast that they’ve done so.
Yes, that may sound a bit harsh. But it’s not your fault! You’re just ink on paper—tattered, faded, and thumbtacked into submission. Nor is it the fault of the people who put that ink there, folks who worked hard to smith the words and solidify the ideas behind them. These are well-intentioned efforts designed to bring real value to the company.
The problem is a lack of actionability. Nearly 75% of the people in companies like yours say they don’t know how to apply the high-minded values printed upon you. Around the same number simply don’t believe them to be authentic. And your customers? They’re skeptical of corporations to begin with, and your lofty claims of service and collaboration ring hollow.
Another issue is a glaring absence of variety. The fact that the very same words show up in some 50% of all corporate values statements should be a red flag. Integrity is table stakes when everyone expects it. Innovation is generic when everyone aspires to it. Diversity is homogeneous when everyone claims it.
Your well-meaning creators had high ambitions while sorting through the thesaurus, and the all-company survey delivered the right data to inform decisions that wouldn’t offend anyone. Even as you felt yourself going through the print rollers, with thousands of your gleaming counterparts beaming with fresh ink, trimmed, dried and shipped— many times in multiple languages—you were ready to take on the world, and unite it.
Don’t get us wrong. Cultural beacons like you remain important. And keeping thousands of employees beating the same drum is harder than ever—particularly as a company expands across cultures, stitches together remote offices and connects itself through Zoom screens.
To maintain an organization’s cultural fabric takes more than an isolated set of sanitized abstractions. It requires real purpose, character, and intent.
That’s where our better way comes in. We’ve found that when an organization defines its unique Purpose and connects it to a set of Experience Principles, that process generates much clearer meaning and expectations for all constituents.
CEOs have principles that more authentically define company performance.
HR departments have clarity for the hiring, evaluation, advancement and dismissal.
Investors see a more actionable and measurable set of organizational impacts.
And employees feel more keenly what behavior is expected of them.
So, our dear old friend, your days may be numbered. Where values often fail to inspire the cultural spark and clarity they strive for, Experience Principles can have more edge, and be a more definitive decision-making mechanism for action. And actions that live up to what you say build trust across your stakeholders, and further belief in your organization.
We think you deserve a comeback, and Experience Principles happen to look great on a poster too. Let’s say we act in accordance with your third bullet, “Sustainability,” place you gently in the break room recycle bin, and get cracking on your next version.
Indelibly yours,
Jeff, Thom, Matt, and Mike
A toast to the fading glory of a legendary Internet pioneer whose life has been equal parts success story and cautionary tale.
A tale of reclaimed food, unreasonable hospitality, and the powerful thing that happens when a team has a profound, shared sense of how to deliver the exceptional.
The once-humble, ever-sturdy Stanley Quencher has suddenly become more than a stainless steel water bottle. Now the pressure’s on—and the moves Stanley makes next may affect the brand’s reputation for the next hundred years.