Somewhere this quarter, a company is holding a values offsite. There is a facilitator. There are sticky notes. There is a whiteboard filling up with words like integrity and excellence and teamwork, and by the end of the day those words will be voted on, wordsmithed, and sent to a designer, and eventually they will appear on a wall in vinyl lettering, and almost none of it will change what happens on the floor on Tuesday.
Here is the conviction, and it will save you that entire day: you cannot invent purpose, vision, and values. You can only uncover them. They are not waiting to be brainstormed. They are already there, in what your company actually does when no one is workshopping.
This is not a soft claim. It is the finding of the most-cited framework in the field. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in Building Your Company’s Vision, studied enduring companies for six years and landed on a sentence every owner should tape to the conference room door: you do not create core values, you discover them. You find them by looking inside, not outside. The wrong question is “what values should we have.” The right question is “what values do we already, truly hold, the ones we would keep even if they cost us.” Their word for the fake version is unambiguous. You cannot fake an ideology. Try, and you manufacture the exact cynicism the last post was about: everyone on the floor knows which words on the wall the building doesn’t mean.
Stop writing. Start finding.
So the work is not authorship. It is archaeology. Somewhere in your company’s actual history is a day you did the costly right thing when the cheap wrong thing was sitting right there. A day you kept a promise that hurt. A hire you made, or refused to make, that told everyone what you actually stand for. Those days are your values, already lived, already paid for. Your job is to dig them up and name them, not to dream up new ones and hope they take.
This is why the first phase of the HQ Method is called the Uncovery, and why it refuses to hand you a values worksheet. We derive your Beacons from the receipts, the behaviors and budgets and decisions that already reveal what you believe, and we write them as instructions, not adjectives. Uncovered, not invented. A value with a receipt behind it is real the day you name it, because it was real long before. A value with nothing behind it is a wish in a nice font, and everyone can tell the difference.
If naming yours feels like relief instead of homework, that is the sign you are doing it right. You are not being asked to become something. You are being asked to see what you already are and stop apologizing for it.
Your first move
Do not open a blank document titled “Our Values.” Open your calendar and your bank statement instead. Find one place where you already spend time or money against your own short-term interest, consistently, because it matters to you more than the cost. That is a value, and it has a receipt. Name it in plain language, as a thing you do, not a thing you admire. You just uncovered one. You have more than you think, and not one of them came from a whiteboard.
A squirrel worth chasing
Michelangelo is supposed to have said that carving David was simple: you just chip away everything that doesn’t look like David. It’s a wonderful line, and he almost certainly never said it. The quote investigators trace it to a joke older than he was, pinned on him later because it sounded right. But here is the honest part, and it is better than the legend. The real idea is his. In an actual letter, he wrote that the sculptor reaches his goal by taking away what is superfluous, and in a real sonnet he claimed the finished figure already lives inside the block, waiting for the hand skilled enough to remove the rest. That is exactly the move. The statue was never invented. It was uncovered, by removing everything it wasn’t. Your purpose, your vision, your values are the figure in your company’s marble. They are already in there. The offsite hands you a fresh block and a chisel and points you at the wrong stone.
Let’s take care of each other,
Oh, and PS… here’s the standard in corporate harmony…