No Shenanigans
avc.com
avc.com
A more interesting question, I think, is what other Values (that didn't make the list) the Company is prepared to let slide in order to achieve the official ones that did make the list. If you are optimising for some specific set of values, that must mean you are prepared to let other unnamed ones slide a little.
e.g. to achieve 'Kindness' you might need to let 'Consistency' slide, and so on.
So what Values is a company not prioritising? Thats a much more interesting discussion.
edit: Lets have a worked example, make this a bit more concrete.
Lets say Organisation X is a community interest company and has the following values:
* Leadership
* Excellence
* Collaboration
* Integrity
* Commitment
What a lovely bunch of values. Who wouldn't want to adopt those?
But whats more interesting to think about is "what are they prepared to compromise to achieve those values?":
e.g. if Commitment is an important value, does that mean Flexibility is not valued so much? Because surely if you are committed, you lose flexibility. Or if Collaboration is an important value, does that mean 'Delivering things on time' is less valued? Because collaborating with everybody takes time to organise.
Beneath this slogan, some witty soul had stencilled 'SECOND ONLY TO PROFIT' in a slightly smaller font.
That's why Facebook's "Move fast and break things" is so powerful (and so revealing) as a value statement, as it showed that Facebook was willing to break any number of things to move fast. Google's "Don't be evil", as words, is utterly useless, because nobody considers themselves evil. Google shutting down their consumer-facing site so that they could honor the terms of their AOL deal, however, spoke huge volumes, as did them pulling out of China in 2010 regardless of the cost to their market. Similarly, them going back into China regardless of privacy and human rights violations also speaks volumes.
What was the story here? I'm not familiar with this and I can't seem to find anything on Google about it :)
The story was told to me as a Noogler (in 2009) as an example of Googliness, and also as a significant milestone in the company's development. The backdrop of this was the dot-com bust: web companies were failing left and right, and nobody knew who would be left standing. By shutting off their own consumer brand to honor the terms of the contract, Google made a name for themselves as someone who would move hell or high water for their partners, which built critical trust in what was then a promising but unproven startup.
It is a means of stating the value you assign to a concept or ideal.
The implicit statement of a list of values is that these are things that are valued highly. But of course, some things are valued more highly than others, and other things not on the list are also valued, at different levels.
Sometimes positive traits can be assigned a very low value, in a company statement such as this. For example, Netflix famously does not value a highly stable workforce. It's not that they don't want stability, or think it's stupid, it's that they value other things much more highly.
Or, in other words, the concept of value is not binary.
Inverse values are unnamed; it would be interesting to know what they are and decide if we agree to let them go.
I suspect this is so strict that if we poked at it it wouldn't allow for the existence of values. Simply, it's probably nearly impossible to make a useful list of even two values that can't possibly come into conflict—if you cannot compromise either, period, what then? So now we can only have one value. But I doubt even a list of one would fare much better under scrutiny and a few reasonable thought experiments & socratic questioning.
Avery Pennarun puts this similarly: "... useful organizational values come in the form of tradeoffs: giving up one nice thing in order to get some other nice thing."
As noted at the end of https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 (and discussed here at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21088425)
The one that comes to mind immediately would be the classic FB "move fast and break things" motto. It explicitly states what the company wants, and what it's willing to sacrifice to get there.
Consistency over Completeness
Fairness over Kindness
Volume over Efficiency
etc
Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
* Communication – We have an obligation to communicate. * Respect – We treat others as we would like to be treated. * Integrity – We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly, and sincerely. * Excellence– We are satisfied with nothing less than the very best in everything we do. (Enron, Annual Report, 2000, p. 29).
The whole thing is a joke, the confusing bit is that a lot of companies haven't worked that out yet.
For example, we held something to the effect of "We value open disagreement and direct communication more than harmonious relations" This was a great value: the company needed to have tight OODA loops and that did not permit beating around the bush. People had differences of opinion and they needed to be able to express them and come to conclusions. In other orgs it could have been valid to have a get-along attitude if things were more important to keep steady (a successful and functioning business unit, for example, might prefer to keep going steadily without rocking the boat).
At the same time, the company also said "We value thinking things through from first principles rather than re-applying what has already been done elsewhere." This meant you couldn't justify a decision on "well we did it that way at company x", you had to have a good reason to do something a certain way. This cost us time (unlike the previous value) because decisions or designs could be challenged for not having a good justification. The upside was that it led (I think) to better designs, and encouraged people to debate bad decisions before making them.
We didn't have any values that looked like "honesty" or "excellence". That was nice.
It's both funny and sobering to examine how what seems like a useful and valuable foundation ends up being flimsy and easy to ignore when made vague enough.
Merriam-Webster tells us: The history of shenanigan is as tricky and mischievous as its meaning. Etymologists have some theories about its origins, but no one has been able to prove them. All we can say for certain is that the earliest known use of the word in print appeared in the April 25, 1855, issue of San Francisco's Town Talk. Although the "underhanded trick" sense of the word is oldest, the most common senses in use now are "tricky or questionable practices" (as in "political shenanigans") and "high-spirited behavior" (as in "youthful shenanigans").[1]
First use in 1855. Cool. I wondered what that first context was. So I used the site Chronicling America to find the April 25th, 1855 issue of Town Talk. But along the way I found earlier uses in the August 18th, 1854 issue of the Nevada Journal[2] and February 3rd, 1855 issue of the Sierra Citizen.[3]
I still don't have the definitive etymological answer but what the web allows a layperson to usefully research in 2019 is astounding!
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shenanigan
[2] https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026884/1854-08-1...
[3] https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86058097/1855-02-0...
> $ curl -I https://api.twilio.com
X-Ice-Cream: true
Should just be:
Ice-Cream: true
Of course, who gets to pull these levers and when is a completely separate issue. As usual it's up to the leadership whether any values are used in a healthy or unhealthy way. Does frugality apply when an employee wants an ergonomic keyboard, or when a VIP flies business class? Does be-humble apply when negotiating compensation or to the CEO's vision?
Amazon, for example, is famous for weaponizing frugality and disagree-and-commit against lower level employees. At $OldJob I got to watch a director pull the move-fast lever whenever his team wanted to ship, and the safety-first lever for other teams.
Written values can't really be good vs bad. They are more like a tool, and will be used for good or evil depending on who is operating them.
"The rest of the fucking owl" is a meme about laughably incomplete instructions, in case you didn't catch the reference: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1272765-how-to-draw-an-owl
"Draw the owl" is a pretty ironic rule, because it's horribly incomplete itself unless you're familiar with that particular meme.
I wonder how many people work at Twilio who have heard "draw the owl," and know it has something to do with being consistent, but has no idea what it means or why it seems to be clear to everyone else?
We have kind of moved away from it officially AFAICT so now it's more of an inside joke that old-timers use to assert dominance
I genuinely don't know.
Some are soft, some are hard. “Fair play” and “equality” are very common ones, which overlap mostly with “No Shenanigans” in this example. The purpose of values is to codify acceptable behavior, and promote a nurturing environment.
“Provide exemplary HTTP endpoint documentation“ would be a bit more Twilio specific, but the ethos of the shared value itself is a common one. It’s a pity that in the 21st century the only values agreements most post education adults enter into are the ones with their employer, but we live in a very individualist society.
I think from an employee perspective, seeing leaders talk about squishy things like "company values" can feel hokey and gimmicky. After all, even Enron had plaques hanging in their headquarters about their values. So are values just the sort of snake-oil marketing buzzwords you use to sell how great and "innovative" your organization to investors and prospective employees (e.g. WeWork)?
I certainly think that this is true to some extent for most companies.
At the same time I also think they're really important for founders/leaders to articulate and stick with. It explicitly formalizes a set of moral norms, behavioral patterns and ideologies you want those who are part of your company to abide by. They're pithy shorthands for verbally and explicitly describing your company's aspirational culture to others who are not part of it.
I think a lot of us feel disgruntled and frustrated when leaders profess one set of values, and seem to live by another. I think many of us would prefer to work for a company where the values aren't explicitly stated, but they're followed than for a company where the reverse is true (e.g. Enron).
At it's core, I think having a set of company values is basically having a list of aspirational behavioral norms that you have agreed to collectively prioritize. It allows people to check people's decisions against these norms (e.g. "Hey, I think you're doing something sneaky that makes our company look good to prospective clients, but I think it's important we respect our value of 'No Shenanigans.'"), and also make decisions (e.g. "One thing we value is to 'Not Settle'. Are we settling in this product decision?").
Done well, it can be really motivating and purposeful.
Done hypocritically or inconsistently, it just feels like another marketing gimmick that big companies do.
even corrupt dumpster fire companies tend to try and honor their corporate values as a kind of tie breaker. I know of a company that is so corrupt it routinely has to fire people who created fake roles and then secretly hired family members for them; which has problems with backstabbing, etc. and is crazy political but when it comes down to it will actually try to honor the stated company ideals.
In this way they act as a norming force to keep everyone in a large company aligned on how decisions should be made and what behaviours are considered good. One of the biggest challenges a large organization faces is keeping all its parts aligned, and a specific set of values helps with that.
For example, "we are egolessly mission driven" is one of our values: this helps us recruit the right people (drawing people want to work at a mission-oriented company; turning away people who just want a random job), as well as helping us notice and nudge employees who might be (accidentally) engaging in political maneuvering.
"we focus ruthlessly on the most important thing" helps us filter recruits out who don't want to take work seriously, helps make our Slack channels much quieter / less spammy than most companies, and helps employees self-improve along the axis of protecting their focus time.
Stating explicitly what you care about, and talking about these things a lot, is a huge aspect of how a company defines its culture as it grows beyond ~ 10 people or so.
I work at a place that cares about its values, because they are the cultural aspirations of the people we serve, and we are one of the organizations that are trying to preserve those values.
I dearly want those words to succeed and not be empty platitudes, but the only way that works is if they actually provide guidance and the individual decision maker considers them with each decision. Often they become empty words when folks are "too cool for school" or just have other goals.
I've seen leaders who believe in an organization's values and those that don't. For myself, I do like those that follow the values better because they provide one bit of stability that I crave: predictable decisions. Chaos is fun sometimes, but a damn pain when work is concerned. Its interesting to me that often when describing a failed corporation the "getting away from core values" is often cited.
They also provide a bit of self examination. Do I actually have a set of values? Would I cut and run if my values conflict with my comfort? Are the values as acted upon by where I work compatible with my own internal values? If not, then you might not find your career fulfilling at that organization.
The CEO/management puts half (or more) of their salary into some account, and at the end of every month the employees decide whether or not the company is going by its values. If not, certain charities which represent those values are given the money.
Its super important for it to be explicitly stated. The difference amongst companies not explicitly stating their values and ones who “wander” is documented.
They've changed a bit in the 15 years I've been there but happy to say we still try to live by them today.