Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Company Values are generally a bunch of nice things and you look at them and think well yes thats nice.

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.

> But whats more interesting to think about is "what are they prepared to compromise to achieve those values?"

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)

I forget where I read this, but the best values are ones that actually explicitly state the tradeoffs you are talking about as part of the value. The best values are statements that, if the logic were inverted, could also apply as values to a different company that cares about different types of outcomes.

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.

Yes, I have seen values like:

Consistency over Completeness

Fairness over Kindness

Volume over Efficiency

etc

Sounds like Andy Grove's "High Output Management", which I believe mentions that values need to be something you can use to make a decision one way or the other.

Agile manifesto nailed that

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.

-Years ago, I spent a couple of weeks offshore on a vessel on which the owners had stencilled on the aft superstructure 'SAFETY FIRST' in 5ft tall letters.

Beneath this slogan, some witty soul had stencilled 'SECOND ONLY TO PROFIT' in a slightly smaller font.

In its annual report to shareholders, Enron listed its core values as follows:

* 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.

If you're willing to let a value slide, its not a value. Values should be things you're willing to stick to even when it hurts you. I think that misunderstanding/lie is the problem with most "values" list.

But that's the point - where are you willing to be hurt? That's a more interesting question than what you are ostensibly willing to stick to, and much more revealing about the organization's culture. Everybody wants all the nice things, but what really reveals your values is when you want two nice things that are contradictory - which do you choose?

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.

> Google shutting down their consumer-facing site so that they could honor the terms of their AOL deal

What was the story here? I'm not familiar with this and I can't seem to find anything on Google about it :)

When they were young (2002) Google signed a contract with AOL to become the default search provider there. When they flipped the switch, AOL gave them so much traffic that they lacked server capacity to service all the requests. Rather than renege on the contract, they shut down google.com and redirected all hardware resources toward servicing the AOL traffic until they could build more servers and make any necessary software optimizations.

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.

The word value is literal.

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.

Thats exactly what I'm talking about, thanks

But no... When a value is put forward then the inverse value (or competing ones) have to be downplayed or actively discouraged.

Inverse values are unnamed; it would be interesting to know what they are and decide if we agree to let them go.

> If you're willing to let a value slide, its not a value.

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.

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