If everything is valued, nothing is. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Most values are useless.

I bet you’ve seen company values that seems to be laundry lists of every generic, positive-adjacent adjective that the drafter could imagine. Integrity. Kindness. Generosity. Boldness. Accountability. Fun. Customer-centricity. Learning. Innovation. Diversity. Teamwork. Passion.

As pleasant as they may sound, I don’t find these value lists to be particularly compelling. It’s hard to put a finger on why, but I think it’s because they don’t strike me as being useful or applicable to the day-to-day work that goes on in the company.

For example - what does it mean to have integrity as a value? To prefer telling the truth over lying, all else equal? Is that really a conflict that comes up frequently and intensely enough to merit an explicit reminder? What happens when telling the truth conflicts with another value, such as kindness or boldness?

Values don’t have to be useless.

This is all fine if you accept that corporate values need to be nothing more than cliches. Maybe not all companies need to be trailblazers. Maybe it’s fine to slot in placeholder values with minimal thought and focus on other things. Or maybe values are just observations - not intended to direct, but to describe.

I think well-written and useful values can be something more: a signal at the essence of what differentiates a company and its culture. At their best, values are a prominent north star to coordinate groups and guide decision-making at scale, cutting through the natural overhead of large organizations. If you believe in the power of values to represent a shared dream - to unite and inspire - then tepid and generic values are a tragedy.

Useful values are lean.

People have bounded attention spans and memories. If you have a long list of values, you might as well have no values, because nobody is going to remember them anyways.

Even if you do manage to remember all these values, the more you have, the more likely they are to conflict. When you have conflicting values, you get bogged down in debates over which values take precedence for particular decisions. These debates slow decision-making and lead to internal strife unless everybody involved is well-aligned on which values come first. (One way to relax this limit is to stack-rank your values, which solves for conflicts, but not for memorability.) You can fall back to personal judgment, but each time you do so, the importance of the values erode.

Like many tools, values become significantly less useful if you forget them or can’t figure out which one to use. Keep your list of values short, memorable, and differentiating.

Useful values force trade-offs.

They can be turned into principles which can repeatedly inform decision-making. Take the Agile Manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.

Each value is worded in a way that unambiguously describes a trade-off. There are many ways you can do this, but I like to structure each of my values as “Prefer X over Y”. Crucially, both X and Y must be reasonably desirable in order for the value to be useful. In other words, if the value could be reversed (i.e., “Prefer Y over X”) and still present an acceptable approach, then it is actually meaningful. Values have to inform hard choices, and they can’t do so if the written paragon is a weak-willed statement like “prefer honesty and respect over treachery and genocide”.

Useful values reflect reality.

Values are vulnerable to becoming divorced from the realities of person or company’s actions. Even if the values you write down are the same ones in your head on day 1, time and experience rarely leave them unscathed. Every choice is a referendum on their continued importance, and unless you keep them in the forefront of your decision-making processes, they’re likely to dim over time. Once values stop being present in decision-making, they become afterthoughts. From there, it’s a short trip to irrelevance.

Similarly, values need to be revisited and refreshed as an entity changes or environment conditions shift. A company that has grown from one person to ten thousand while keeping the same set of values is almost certainly deluding itself, either about the appropriateness of its values when it first adopted them, their current applicability, or continuity between the two.

There may appear to be a tension between reinforcement and adaptability.

Reinforcement doesn’t mean that a value needs to remain static. In fact, the visible stress that occurs when a vestigial value is prioritized in a changing environment is a key indicator that the value should be revisited. This stress would never surface if the value wasn’t constantly being evoked. As such, value reinforcement and evolution are inherently intertwined, and a useful value system cannot exist without both.

Make your values more useful.

Almost all lists of company values are superficial. They’re full of platitudes that cannot be used to inform real-world choices because they’re too numerous, all of nominally equal importance, and rarely referenced.

To make your values useful, limit their number, structure them in a way that forces tradeoffs, and reinforce them by tightly integrating them into decision-making processes. All of this applies to personal values, too.

Values don’t have to be empty, but you have to do a lot of work to ensure they’re not.