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Comment by mindwok | Hacker News Reader

I've become pretty cynical of company principles and values. My experience of this is that it's usually an exercise of leadership getting together and coming up with a bunch of things they wish they were, then putting them on the wall as if it makes them true. In reality though it's really hard to make these things true.

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> In reality though it's really hard to make these things true.

Yeah, the best example I saw of this was:

   * a small company (under 50 employees)

   * a very deliberate values gathering process across all the employees, not just senior leaders

   * performance reviews and spot bonuses tied to values sightings

   * regular review of how the values fit with current efforts

Just like anything else with a group of people, it takes a lot of work to get it right. Inertia is powerful.

There’s a good model by or popularized by Patrick Lencioni that I’ve rarely seen. It sorts values into aspirational, accidental/historical reality, permission-to-play (I.e. mandatory values in your industry), and the rest. According to the model, the rest are the only good ones. You rarely see them because the other three types are easy and safe to say to leadership.

We often say, values are the sum of all the people who have ever been or are at Focused.

We try really hard not to make them aspirational. I will say leadership didn't make these they came from our engineers.

These were not designed by leadership. I am pretty cynical of values as well, and these bubbled out of a few sr engineers who cared about helping new folks assimilate to our engagement style quickly.

happy to talk more about it

It's especially funny when a two or three person company writes something like this ... But it's perfect if you want to be a consultant to a major university.

We are a bit bigger than 2 or three folks :)

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