Enron’s Values Were Excellent

Here's a set of corporate values. See if they'd fit on your office wall.

Respect. We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. Integrity. We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly and sincerely. Communication. We have an obligation to communicate. Excellence. We are satisfied with nothing less than the very best in everything we do.

They're good, aren't they? Clear, warm, hard to argue with. They belonged to Enron.

They were printed in the annual report, framed on walls and backed by a long code of ethics. A year or so later, the company collapsed into what was then the largest bankruptcy in American history, and "Enron" became a byword for corporate fraud.

The values weren't badly written. That's the problem. They read exactly like everyone else's, because almost every company's values are built from the same dozen words: integrity, respect, excellence, innovation, teamwork, customer focus. They're chosen because nobody could object to them. Which means nobody could be held to them either.

Try this. Take your own organisation's values, Enron's, and those of two or three other companies. Remove the names. Show them to a group of your staff, a few customers and a couple of suppliers. Ask which set belongs to you.

Most people can't tell. If your values are interchangeable with a company that went down for fraud, they aren't saying anything about you.

The fix isn't better adjectives. It's specifics. A value means something when it costs you something, when it tells someone what to do on a bad Tuesday when two good things conflict. "Integrity" tells nobody anything. "We tell a client when we've made a mistake before they find it" is a rule people can follow, and a standard you can be caught breaking.

The second fix is examples. People don't learn culture from a list of words. They learn it from what happens to the person who missed their numbers but did the right thing, and the person who hit their numbers and didn't. What you reward is your real values statement. Everything on the wall is just commentary.

If what you say, what you want and what you reward don't line up, the words aren't values. They're decoration. Enron had beautiful decoration.