Culture and Values

Make your values mean something

Your corporate values statement may be doing more harm than good. Here's how to fix it.

Take a look at this list of corporate values: Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence. They sound pretty good, don't they? Strong, concise, meaningful. Maybe they even resemble your own company's values, the ones you spend so much time writing, debating, and revising. If so, you should be nervous. These are the corporate values of Enron, as stated in the company's 2000 annual report. And as events have shown, they're not meaningful; they're meaningless.