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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

This brings to mind the Tony Hsieh quote, "You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down."

All successful startups are fighting a battle against entropy. And entropy is becoming indistinguishable from all the other companies out there. Which means losing what made them succeed in the first place.

This is why company culture is important. You need to know what your values are. And then you need to maintain them. Even at the cost of the wrong short-term profitable opportunities.

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> "You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down."

That aged well...

True, the pressure on him to be some sort of guru of happiness lead to an experiment that turned out tragically.

But that doesn't invalidate the importance of the principles on which Zappos succeeded under his leadership.

It is a mistake to dismiss key insights merely because they come from someone who had human flaws. We all have human flaws, and we all make mistakes.

> You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down.

This reads more like some corporate-aimed PR than earnest words that left the mouth of a human

It is actually true. If you have an option to defraud people and dont take it, then you actually have "not defrauding" as a value.

If you take bigger salary in exchange of defrauding people, say by denying insurance payment to people who should have it, you dont have "not defrauding" as a value.

Are there there any good studies on this topic? I find that most people's morals are far too flexible when put to the test.

While it’s true it also seems kinda worthless through broad applicability and ties moral values to power or money, which I don’t think many people would agree with.

Every US president since FDR would have “not killing everyone” as a value by not hitting the big red button. Almost nobody else will get to be tested in that way. Is that actually a value?

There is also a private information problem. If it never occurred to me to defraud investors, but it was retroactively discovered I could have (and gotten away with it?), do I get the “doesn’t defraud” value? Does the more evil version of me get the value, as long as they thought of it but didn’t act on it?

> Every US president since FDR would have “not killing everyone” as a value by not hitting the big red button.

This doesn't apply, your morals are only tested once you have to sacrifice something that you find valuable in order to uphold your morals, whether that is money, power, or something else.

And yet, they left the mouth of a human.

The point that he was explaining when I saw the quote was why the hiring process at Zappos had a "culture fit" part of the interview process. Because you can't maintain a culture, if you have employees who aren't aligned on values. Maintaining this requires passing up on opportunities to hire people who will be productive, because you think that they will undermine the culture.

The importance of culture as a value to the organization is demonstrated by passing up on opportunities that would undermine it. Even if those opportunities are otherwise good.

The semantics are fine, putting aside the bullshit about corporate culture. It just sounds like a press release rather than natural language. The key signal here is “opportunities”.

The human in question was a CEO for around 20 years. People who spend that long in the C-suite absorb a certain amount of corporate language.

And while you may consider corporate culture to be bullshit, others don't. Where others includes every entrepreneur who built a large company that I've ever seen speak on the subject.

I've been lucky enough to see good versus bad corporate cultures first hand. So I also fit into that other bucket. Though admittedly more looking at the issue from somewhere near the bottom, rather than the view from the top.

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