An oral history, for something cultural like the transmission of values in a company, is much more effective than a set of written values because each transmission is also accompanied by some human trust and emotion which adds much needed authenticity. Oral history is also never remembered verbatim. With each transmission, it is rehashed and reformed and recalibrated to bring it closer to the truth. As different chains of Chinese whispers diverge and find conflicts when they re merge, there is an opportunity for improvement and adaptation of the ideas.

As text is just a temporary abstraction from the real world, writing values down is useful as a way to capture a freeze-frame of an ever evolving and iterating story. Values are not cold facts, they are the demonstrated actions of individuals, borne out by their behavior. Treating the codified values as dogma is a recipe for stagnation and decline in civil virtue.

Purpose of Business Values

Modern business suffers from the gravitational pull of nepotistism and short-term, empty profit-seeking or rent-seeking tasks which can be done at minimal cost to the business but minimally benefit the client, typically by exploiting, the client’s domain ignorance, poor regulatory calibration or regulatory capture. The forces of human nature are dragging an organization in this direction at every moment.

True success lies in defying the odds to build something better than a drawbridge. The purpose of a business values should therefore be to explicitly resist the natural pull towards degeneration.

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” (Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time, a collection of essays published in 1996)

As the organization grows, resisting this becomes even more difficult and incentives become ever more misaligned, politics eat into decision-making efficacy.

Any organization with a large, protected income will tend by default toward administrative bloat. It’s the same in government, at Harvard, at Google. Unless you take explicit measures to avoid it, you’ll over hire. And then you have a second problem: all the unnecessary people you’ve hired become a drag on the necessary ones. The unproductive people need to seem like they’re achieving something, so they’ll organize meetings to waste the time of the productive ones.

— Paul Graham Twitter, 2022

All orgs get to the point where their internal processes and systems are decaying faster than any sort of intervention can save them. Like leprosy or necrotizing fasciitis, the patient still lives but their days are numbered… Keeping a bloated workforce busy on some make work Potemkin project doesn’t provide job security. It just kicks the can down the road.

― SLS: Is cancellation too good? – Casey Handmer’s blog (wordpress.com)

In short, suffering through the inherited dogmatic processes of a previous generation breeds a sort of learned helplessness.

The vision statement poster pinned to the wall in the HR department which appeals to dynamism, interpersonal trust and quality control does not reflect the corporate culture. In fact, it reflects what is missing. Culture is what is actually seen to be punished and rewarded within an organization.