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.