Your company's values will be used against you

The problem isn’t the intent; it’s the execution.

You’re right. I did that wrong.

Most for-profit companies have two sets of values. The first set is universal, often implicit, and kind of unpleasant? It is: Companies value money. At a minimum, they value having enough to survive, but most want more than that. Most companies want to be rich, often as rich as possible, and will make decisions that maximize how rich they can get. 

We know that companies value money because, of course they do, and because companies do a lot of displeasing things to make more of it.¹ They fire people. They build factories that pollute the environment. They tell their employees to work in dangerous conditions in those factories. They provide lousy customer service that makes people mad at them on the internet; they start charging customers for things that used to be free; they raise prices when their customers don’t want them to; they sometimes sue their customers when they are late on their bills. In general, nobody wants to do these things,² but people like jobs and money, customers like products, and everyone knows that this is how the whole system works. Deep down, most of us want capitalism on that wall.

But all of this is somewhat unpleasant to think about, and most people don’t want to lead or work at companies that are singularly motivated to make money as ruthlessly as possible. Most people would prefer some moderation—they would trade some corporate profits for better employee benefits, or cleaner factories, or promises to treat customers respectfully. Most people also care about how their employer tries to make money. They want to work at a company that is willing to move fast and break things, or isn’t evil, or is radically transparent, and they want to work with other people who want similar things. Though these ideas necessarily put constraints on how much money a company can make—a company could always make more money if it had the option to be slow, or evil, or deceptive—it’s a deal that most people, including founders, executives and boards, want to make. 

And so, companies will often write a second set of values about how they want to work. Unlike the first set of values, these values are differentiated, prescriptive, and, often, quite appealing. For example, Airbnb values embracing the adventure. Atlassian values playing, as a team. Uber values building with heart. Figma values play. Pfizer values joy.³ Boost Insurance values always laughing.⁴ Koch Industries values principled entrepreneurship™. I could do this forever. 

It’s not an accident that there are links to nicely designed corporate webpages for this second set of values, and there aren’t any links for the first set. The first set is unpleasant! The second set sounds nice! Everyone knows that companies want to make lots of money.⁵ Everyone knows that the only true value most companies have is to survive at all legal costs, and maybe some gently illegal ones. Everyone knows that if Airbnb, say, isn’t making enough money, it will fire a bunch of people and tell others they need to work more. Everyone knows that making money—at least enough to survive—will always be more important to Airbnb than how it makes that money. That’s how all of this works; there’s no reason for Airbnb to advertise it. It’s much nicer—and much more helpful, when people are trying to decide where they want to work—for Airbnb to say that working at Airbnb is an adventure.

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But there are problems with this. First, while everyone knows that companies have to make tradeoffs between making money and anything that isn’t making money, corporate values rarely say where that line is. Is Salesforce committed to net zero to the point of shutting itself down? Does Zoom’s dedication to delivering happiness to its teammates change when its income declines from $1.4 billion in 2021 to $100 million in 2022? How playful will Spotify be when it struggles to turn a profit? There are no easy answers to these questions, but that’s the point—despite values often being framed as constitutional beliefs, they are actually squishy gestures at unknown and unknowable tradeoffs. 

Second, it’s not clear what values are meant to represent. In some cases, they’re presented as personality traits, as a kind of corporate Myers–Briggs. Lego is imaginative and creative; Twilio is curious; EY values “teaming.”⁶ In other cases, however, values are framed as binding contracts to which both the company and its employees are accountable. Snowflake’s values are vaguely threatening. Coinbase, famously, makes being mission first a condition of employment. Lockheed Martin’s core values—printed on an “Ethics Awareness Training” PDF and shared alongside something called the Code of Ethics and Business Conduct—are basically a DocuSign from a lawyer. 

This ambiguity creates a quasi-legal apparatus around how both companies and the people who work at them can treat their values. Can you be fired from Stripe for not being “exothermic?”⁷ Can an engineer at Meta object to being told to work on something that’s not awesome? On one hand, these questions seem ridiculous. On the other hand, are they? They only sound ridiculous because of the content of the value. If a Meta engineer objected to working with a manager who was indirect and disrespectful—which would violate another one of Meta’s core values—that would seem very reasonable.

The third problem is that values are often loose and difficult to interpret. The consulting class loves to talk about values as a North Star—but a North Star only works if we can figure out where it’s pointing us. If a marketer at Yeti asks for help on a project they’re struggling with, are they living the value that “no one succeeds alone”? Or are they failing to “continually strive for improvement”? How do Asana employees judge if they are working with heartitude?⁸ Rumble tells itself to “be fearless in our pursuit.” That’s it; that’s the end of the sentence. I mean. What?⁹ 

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In some ways, though, Rumble’s dangling value is instructive. A lot of values—make work human; stay hungry; generic corporate adjectives like respect, integrity, and accountability; indiscriminate fearless pursuit—don’t mean anything. They project a vibe.¹⁰ Rumble could say their values are Tucker Max, Barstool Sports, crypto, and ivermectin, and it would be very dumb, but everyone would understand exactly what it would be like to work there. 

Or maybe it wouldn’t be dumb? While vague, ambiguous instructions like “We work hard together so we can play hard together” and saying “our values are Entourage, the Kelce brothers, and espresso martinis” can describe more or less the same thing, only the former makes an already difficult tradeoff between making money and a company’s softer ambitions—like inspiring a brighter work day for all, which Workday says its wants to do, under a value called profitability?—even more confusing. Only the former can sometimes be used as a unifying mantra in some cases, and a weapon in others. Only the former give both executives and employees the ability to pick and choose when and how to apply a rule to their liking.

For example, several years ago, Steph Korey, the founder and then-CEO of Away, described the company’s values an evolving, collaborative, aspirational expression of who Away wants to be:

It's not uncommon for founders to determine what those values are before they even hire their first employee, but it was important for us to involve the team in that process.

Beyond our earliest employees who developed our values and their definitions, we've continued to revisit them as the team has grown, finding a way to involve and engage our newest employees as the team grows. As the team doubled, and again once it tripled, we came together and asked, "Are these still our core values? How do they come to life?" It's about giving our team the context to understand why they exist, and how they actually guide our work. 

The result? Our values aren't just words on a wall, but a guiding philosophy that we put into practice every single day. Whether it's being iterative to respond to the evolving needs of our business, our team, and our customers, or being accessible to encourage transparency and collaboration, or being in it together, reminding ourselves to take the work seriously, but never ourselves.

But, infamously, in the midst of a holiday crunch in 2018, the values became a weapon. From leaked Slack messages that she sent to several Away employees:

I know this group is hungry for career development opportunities, and in an effort to support you in developing your skills, I am going to help you learn the career skill of accountability. …To hold you accountable—which is a very important business skill that is translatable to many different work settings—no more pto or wfh requests will be considered from the 6 of you...I hope everyone in this group appreciates the thoughtfulness I’ve put into creating this career development opportunity and that you’re all excited to operate consistently with our core values.

And a few days later, to the same team:

If you all choose to utilize your empowerment to leave our customers hanging so that two of you can take PTO on the same day, you will have convinced me that this group does not embody Away’s core values.

Korey isn’t alone in exploiting the strategic ambiguity of her company’s values in this way—there are literally guides for this sort of thing: “How do you make the best of a firing, and redeem it so that the entire team (and business) is better for it?  Easy – you fire based on core values violations.”

Even among well-intentioned people, core values can create difficult disagreements. For example, one of Cloudflare’s values is that they “encourage each other's professional development and growth.” After the excruciatingly awkward firing of a sales rep that went viral on TikTok, Cloudflare’s CEO defended the decision to fire the rep on the idea in this value: “We think the right thing to do is get people we know are unlikely to succeed off the team as quickly as possible so they can find the right place for them.” But the fired rep—who was let go three months after starting, was barely off her training ramp, and allegedly got little to no negative feedback from her manager—could’ve objected on the same grounds. A company that encourages people’s professional growth, she could’ve reasonably said, would’ve given her more time and more feedback.

These sorts of tension can play out thousands of ways, across thousands of companies. Someone starts a business to solve a problem. A nascent culture starts to develop. The early employees want to protect and codify culture, to retain their character and individuality, and to protect themselves from becoming the same sort of faceless corporate villain that they probably joined the company to get away from. They want to hire new employees who value the same thing. They want to feel like good people, and writing down "we are good people" is an easy way to do that. 

This works for a while. But at some point, the values will get tested. The company won’t be able to both survive and do what it’s historically defined as good. Or the definition of good becomes hard to interpret. Or some decision—like firing a new sales rep who’s fresh off her ramp—will exemplify the value in one way, and violate it in another. And disagreements about business decisions will become moral wars, where both sides believe that they are fighting with God on their side.¹¹

Call me naive, but I don’t think this is anyone’s intent. I don’t think most companies want to deceive or exploit employees, nor do I think most employees want to extort their employers. As funny as it is that Pfizer says one if its values is joy, I think that desire is genuine. What is misleading is how the value is written: It doesn’t say what joy means, when Pfizer will trade joy for profit, and whether or not joy is a goal or a contractual expectation. 

It’s also a missed opportunity to better match employees with employers. Companies do have different answers to those questions; everyone just has to make guesses about what they are. Workday, an enterprise human capital management software provider, and Chubbies, a lifestyle brand that sells flamboyant short shorts for men, both value “fun.” I’ve never worked at either, but I’m pretty sure they mean it in different ways.

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So what if we didn’t have to guess?

Instead of posting and advertising their values, I think we’d all be better served if companies shared precedents. “In this situation, in which reasonable people could do lots of different things,” they might say, “here is what we did.” For example:

• During a recession last year, when our stock fell by sixty percent, we laid off thirty percent of the company but didn’t cut any benefits, because we believe it’s more important to properly support the employees we can afford rather than avoiding letting people go all costs.

• When a big customer urgently needed a new feature, we told them we’d build it, and the team working on it had to work late nights and weekends for a month, because we’d rather be successful than comfortable.

• When a big customer urgently needed a new feature, we told them we wouldn’t build it, because we couldn’t ship something that we’d be proud of by the deadline they needed it, and we won’t sacrifice product quality for any one customer.

• We have birthday parties for employees because we believe in having fun.

• We build Rube Goldberg machines that pour beer because we believe in having fun.

Rather than making people deduce specific behaviors from a set of generalized values, give them the precedents and let them induce the principles for themselves. The pithy values don’t really matter anyway; what people want to know is what people will do because of them. So just tell them?

Precedents not only clarify where the company draws the line between profit and personality; they also make it plainly clear that there is a line. They describe which behaviors a company treats as expectations of employment, and which ones are simply characteristic of how most people currently act. Though they can still be disputed—situations are different; precedents get overturned¹²—they can’t be twisted to fit the whims of a moment in the same way that values can. And most importantly, precedents are honest. Deficient precedents will bankrupt even the most magnificent promises. People can say they will do anything; but nobody can escape what they’ve done. 

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To be quite clear, I believe that companies should have values. Mode had them, and I’m proud of both what they stood for and how they were expressed. But if they had a flaw, it was having too much pride in the latter point—I clung to what they said; to how they said it; to the language of them. I was too attached to describing the noble ideal I wanted to chase, and too reluctant to embrace the messy reality in which we had to chase it.

I think every company, Mode included, would be better served by expressing their values directly against that reality. Say what you’ve done in those difficult situations. Give examples of how you balance your moral and cultural aspirations with the inevitable unpleasantries of running a business. Outline your character, not with an unproven and unprovable corporate enneagram, but with your record. Draw the hypotenuse of compromise.

1. Contrary to popular belief, companies are not legally obligated to make as much money as possible. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the Supreme Court ruled that, “while it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so.”

2. Ok, some might. According to their website, ExxonMobile’s most important guiding principle is “shareholders.”

3. What?

4. What is Boost Insurance, you ask? I have no idea. I work out of coffee shops from time to time (caffeine, I have recently discovered, is a hell of a drug), and as I was writing this piece, the person next to me was loudly pitching something called Boost. Was it Boost Insurance? Was it Boost VC? Was it Boost Coin, the future of DeFi? Was it Boost®, the nutritional drink for adults? Truly, I couldn’t tell. Which, one, it probably says something that I could listen to a conversation for fifteen minutes and not know if it was about an insurance company, venture capital, crypto, or protein shakes, and, two, don’t talk about your acquisitions at coffee shops.

5. There are exceptions. OpenAI, for example, almost blew itself up for the opposite reason: The employees wanted to go fast and make lots of money, and the board wanted it to slow down and chill out. But this is pretty weird. 

6. What?

7. What?

8. What?

9. I’m being unfair. In Rumble’s case, it’s clear what they’re in pursuit of: Losing $87 million every nine months. Bummer. 

10. For proof that a lot of companies values’ aren’t precisely worded instructions but atmospheric branding, I don’t think that this is a joke?

11. This is an overly dramatic, but not entirely. Unlike HR policies and corporate codes of conduct, values are often framed on almost moral terms. And moral disputes have a very different character than policies disputes. 

12. It also creates a bias in favor of employees over management. Which is probably a good thing, because the corporate balance of power will always be heavily tilted towards management.

The typical company values favor management over employees. When issues arise about what a value means, management can say the employees are simply misinterpreting it. That lets management teams play a bit fast and loose with values; if they ever need to wiggle out of an inconvenient one, it’s not that hard to do.

Though sometimes that’s necessary—I am “management,” after all—it shouldn’t be easy. Precedents solve that problem by creating a clear bias towards the status quo—i.e., the promises that were made to employees. Companies can still change them, but it requires a clear explanation about why the change in necessary.