Company Values Are Compressed Decision Context

Most company values are useless.

Not because values are a bad idea, but because most companies create them in a way that almost guarantees they will become wallpaper.

You get a group of executives in a room and ask, “What should our values be?”

Someone says integrity. Someone else says customer obsession. Innovation usually appears. So does excellence. If the room is feeling adventurous, maybe courage.

Everyone nods. Everyone agrees. And that is usually the first sign that you haven’t discovered anything useful.

A founder I used to work with had a line for this: “If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.” I can’t agree more. Values generic enough to apply to any organisation are meaningless.

If a value is so universally agreeable that no reasonable person would choose the opposite, then it probably isn’t helping anyone make a decision.

And that, to me, is what values are actually for.

A company does not need values to fill out the careers page. It needs them because every week there are hundreds of decisions that cannot sensibly be escalated to the CEO.

Two intelligent, well-intentioned people can look at the same situation and make two completely defensible but different calls.

• Do we ship the feature with a known flaw, or hold it for another week?
• Do we take the large customer whose requirements pull us away from the strategy?
• Do we tolerate exceptional performance from someone who makes the rest of the team worse?
• Do we allow someone to make a decision the CEO disagrees with because it sits within their authority?

These are judgement calls. You cannot write a process for every one of them, and if you try, you end up with an organisation that is slow, brittle and constantly looking upward for permission.

Good values help solve that problem.

A useful value tells someone that when two legitimate choices are in tension, this is the direction the company wants them to lean.

That is why I much prefer values that are expressed as trade-offs.

“We value speed” sounds fine, but it tells me almost nothing.

“We choose speed over polish when the decision is reversible” is much more useful.

“We value customers” is hard to disagree with.

“We choose the long-term customer relationship over this quarter’s revenue” starts to tell me how you want the business to behave.

The moment a value becomes useful is usually the moment it starts costing you something.

It might cost revenue. It might cost speed. It might mean saying no to a customer you would quite like to have. It might mean moving on a talented employee. It might even mean allowing someone to make a decision the founder would personally have made differently.

If there is no sacrifice, there is probably no real value there.

This is also why I think asking people directly what their values are is often the wrong place to start.

People are generally much better at recognising their principles in real situations than they are at inventing them in the abstract.

So I prefer to start with stories.

• Tell me about a moment when you were genuinely proud of the company.
• Tell me about a decision that made you angry.
• Who is someone everyone immediately recognises as “one of us”?
• Who was highly capable but somehow never quite fit?

Those stories are usually full of evidence about what the organisation rewards, protects and rejects.

Once you have that evidence, you can start putting it under pressure.

Give the team situations where two good things are in conflict.

• A major customer offers a large contract, but delivering it drags the roadmap away from the strategy. Do you take it?
• You can ship on Friday with a known flaw, or wait until Tuesday. Which way do you go?
• Your highest performer consistently delivers, but people around them are becoming less effective. What do you do?

The useful part is forcing the initial choice.

For a moment, “it depends” is not allowed.

Pick a side.

Then you ask the much more interesting question: what would have to change for you to flip your answer?

That is often where the real principle appears.

“We move fast” is vague.

“We move fast unless the decision creates irreversible customer, financial or regulatory harm” is much closer to something an employee can use.

And this is why disagreement in these conversations is valuable rather than inconvenient.

If two capable executives repeatedly make different calls in the same kinds of situations, that is not something to smooth over. It is evidence that the organisation is missing shared context.

That disagreement is exactly what you are looking for.

The goal is not to get everyone smiling and aligned before lunch. The goal is to expose the places where sensible people are currently using different rules.

There is another problem in workshops like this, of course, which is seniority.

The CEO answers first, and suddenly everyone else discovers they had roughly the same opinion all along.

So for the important questions, I like everyone to write their answer down before anyone speaks. Then the most senior person speaks last.

It is a tiny structural change, but it dramatically improves the quality of the conversation because people have to decide what they actually think before they know what the boss thinks.

There is one question, though, where I think the most senior person should go first.

What happens when someone makes a reasonable decision, within their authority, with the information available at the time, and the decision turns out badly?

That answer tells you a lot about whether the company really believes in autonomy.

You can tell people they are empowered to make decisions, but if every bad outcome results in blame, second-guessing or punishment, they will quickly learn the real rule: escalate anything important.

Of course, there need to be boundaries. An honest miss is different from negligence, and negligence is different from concealing a mistake.

But unless people know they will be protected when they make a defensible call in good faith, an authority matrix is mostly theatre.

The same test works from the other side of the desk. When I talk to someone with authority over me about what I am going to do, I lead with “I intend to”. The reply I am hoping for is a thumbs-up and nothing else. If I understand the company’s goals and its guard rails well enough, approval should be the default response from my manager, the founder, the board. David Marquet calls this intent-based leadership in Turn the Ship Around!, and it is what an authority matrix looks like when it is working.

The other trap is aspiration.

Companies often write values for the organisation they would like to become rather than the one they currently are.

There is nothing wrong with aspiration, but it needs to be labelled honestly.

If the value says “we trust people to act autonomously” while every meaningful decision still requires three layers of approval, employees will believe the approvals.

And they should.

Behaviour is always more credible than the poster.

For me, the real test of whether values are useful is fairly simple.

Imagine a competent employee has been in the company for six months. They understand where the business is going, what trade-offs matter and where their authority begins and ends.

Then they encounter a genuinely ambiguous decision.

They make the same call the founder would have made.

But they never asked the founder.

That is what good values are for. Not branding or inspiration or a collection of admirable nouns: compressed decision context.

Done well, they let an organisation move faster, with more autonomy and less dependency on the people at the top.

If your values would survive a find-and-replace with a competitor’s name, we should talk.