The value paradox

I’m absolutely fascinated by the debate to re-brand the GOP.  Not that I have any vested interest in either political party. It’s the process and ideas that are eerily reminiscent of similar debates going on in many companies.  Now, here’s a political party that was all about values… social values, family values, core values… and more values.  You’d think that any value-rich party like that would be in power now and forever.  Jack Burkman of Politico.com nailed the GOP value problem in his article just prior to last year’s presidential elections: “The GOP is crumbling. With no leadership and no discernible values, principles or direction, congressional Republicans seem all but certain to be steamrolled by President Barack Obama, whose early approval numbers top 75 percent.” (Italics are mine.)

Let me tackle the value paradox first. Many companies talk about values as in “we don’t discriminate in the workplace.” Sorry, but that’s not a value, at least not in Canada. It’s the law.  It’s like saying “we don’t shoot our employees for poor performance.”  These are clearly not discernible values. I found a better definition of value on a website ranked #1 by Google called (I’m not kidding) “believes and values:” Values are about how we have learnt to think things ought to be or people ought to behave, especially in terms of qualities such as honesty, integrity and openness.

Now, let me take this a little further. I suspect that somewhere, somehow, over time, the whole concept of “value” got de-valued.  It may have something to do with our perverse quest to assign quantitative values to qualitative attributes because, in business, we have to measure everything.  Honesty, integrity and openness are priceless but hard to quantify in the same way as your daily widget output. In fact, these attributes have more to do with morality than the (now) wishy-washy concept of values. It’s unfortunate that “morality” has almost a pejorative meaning, perhaps helped by a few ministers from moral majority circles cavorting with sexual workers.

Morality is defined as principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. Morality is also defined by behavior or qualities judged to be good. And here’s the rub.  Morality in the workplace forces us to take a stand, to judge all people by the same yardstick as they are going to judge us.  Morality is moral excellence based on the code of ethical conduct and it starts at the executive suite.

The code of ethical conduct, practiced, is something that may have saved us from the housing bubble, or prevented senior executives from spending $10 million on office renovations while taxpayers were trying to save their company.  And, let us not forget these values, written in 2001: “We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly and sincerely.”  Yes, that’s Enron.