The Trouble with Values

One of the most contentious issues in the melt-down of Western Capitalism is values. But I’m also finding that when talking about values, I easily end up in a muddle about what values mean – it seems that everyone has a different view.

Mostly they are looked at as objects with a clearly defined meaning. Honesty, truthfullness, care. So far, so good. But what does that mean? Honest to whom? To the public? To the Board? To the employees? To the tax man? And for what reason? Because of the law? Because of inner integrity?

I think values give us trouble, because looking at values as objective traits doesn’t work without first seeing how we operate from values as subjective structures.

Those value structures are not what we think, but how we think. We can see objectively what someone thinks, but our interpretation happens through how we think ourselves.

And there’s the catch. Without introspection and objectivity on ourselves we won’t be able to understand the values someone else filters our values through, and will end up either miscommunicating or imposing our own preferred values.

Now the times of imposing values by Royal or Papal decree is over – in our postmodern times values can’t be prescribed anymore. They have to be internalised, accepted, understood. That’s why most conventional consulting on values is rubbish.

What, rubbish? Those painstakingly crafted corporate values that we’ve carefully rolled out through all-staff breakfast meetings and put up on the walls in beautiful graphics? In a corporate climate of cold mechanistic impersonality, what could possibly be wrong with that?

Unfortunately most corporate values don’t actually touch people’s real values, as they don’t consider the interior of the human being. They don’t deal with the value structure of the individual. If applied in a top-down mechanistic way as a one-size-fits-all, they will be nothing more than the new prescribed mode of being – and nothing to do with real values.

‘Our Customers Come First’ – well what does that really mean to each employee? Is customer value really what makes a human being tick? If a manager cares first and foremost about his team, if a coffee lady lives to please her collegues with great coffee, if an environmental officer looks at the future, is that perhaps not good enough? Do we train them to smile and say the customer comes first? And do they perhaps fear a falling out and losing their job if they pursue wholeheartedly what they truly value?

You can see the trouble… how do we create values that work universally? Hanging some beautiful graphics at the entrance is not enough – values are meaningless unless deeply lived.

‘Shareholder value’ is just as much an oxymoron. If shareholder value is about money for the shareholders, the meaning of the word ‘value’ gets problematic. The values of our shareholders are expressed in the well-being of the organisation, its employees and its natural and social environment – not only now but into our grandchildren’s future. That obviously doesn’t allow for Fred the Shred hiding out in Turkey.

So you can see how ‘care’ or ‘integrity’ will look different depending on the value structure of the human being holding that value. From a purely traditional capitalist perspective care looks different than from a triple-bottom-line perspective.

The only way forward I see is if honesty, dedication, humility and respect (and I’m picking these randomly) stop being seen as soft, vague or taboo, but are the heartbeat of any organisation. Not just as fixed, objective traits, but as living, internalised expressions of what moves us – whatever corporate ranking, cultural background, education, gender or generation we filter those values through.

The one thing we all know is that when you shake someone’s hand, you can tell their values in an instant. If we pay attention, we can’t be fooled. And in a way, we can rebuild our capitalist system just based on that simple fact alone.