Company Values Poster, Annotated by Someone Who Works There
Five words on a wall in a stairwell, each one doing a specific job that has nothing to do with what it says. Plus the four values Enron printed in its final annual report, quoted exactly.
Editor's note: this is satire — with one real document in it
Corveth Industries does not exist. The poster below, its five values, and every internal detail attributed to that company are invented by me for this piece. Nobody said any of it.
One thing here is entirely real and quoted exactly: Enron's stated values, taken verbatim from the company's own 2000 annual report. That section is not satire, is not paraphrased, and is the reason the rest of the piece isn't a strawman.
The people who lost pensions and jobs at Enron are not the target of anything below. The executives who signed the document are.
The poster is in the stairwell between four and five, which is the stairwell nobody uses because the elevators are fine, which is presumably why it's still up.
It's had water damage along the bottom edge. Someone has drawn nothing on it — no moustache, no speech bubble — and I've come to think that's the bleakest detail available. A poster people found worth defacing would at least be a poster people had read.
Five values. Serif type, generous kerning, the specific institutional blue that costs nothing and offends nobody. And I have been at Corveth Industries long enough now to know precisely what each of the five is for, which is never the thing it says.
Here it is, annotated.
The poster
1. INTEGRITY FIRST
Translation
Occupies the first slot because it is the only value that has a legal function. When something goes wrong, the existence of this word on this wall is evidence the company communicated an expectation, which shifts a quantity of liability from the institution onto whichever individual did the thing.
Nothing about it is intended to change behavior. It is intended to have been said.
2. WE'RE A FAMILY
Translation
The single most load-bearing sentence on the poster, and the one doing the most work per syllable.
Families are non-contractual and asymmetric. You don't invoice your family, you don't negotiate with your family, and your family does not have a notice period. Every one of those properties is useful to an employer and none of them is useful to you.
Note the direction of travel. The family frame is deployed when the company wants something unpaid — a weekend, a relocation, a graceful exit. It is never deployed when you want something: no family has ever answered a request for a raise by explaining the compensation band.
3. BIAS FOR ACTION
Translation
Distributes risk-taking downward while leaving decision rights exactly where they were.
You are invited to move fast. You are not invited to the meeting where the direction is set. When it works, the strategy worked; when it fails, someone showed poor judgment. This is the only value on the poster with a genuinely asymmetric payoff structure, which is why it's the one most often quoted back at people during a performance review.
4. RADICAL TRANSPARENCY
Translation
Transparency, in practice, has a direction, and it is upward. Your calendar is visible. Your commits are visible. Your Slack status is visible.
Meanwhile: the runway is not visible, the compensation bands are not visible, the reason the reorg happened is not visible, and the salary range in the posting that hired you was sixty thousand dollars wide.
"Radical" is doing something specific here — it pre-empts the objection. You cannot ask for more transparency at a company that has already declared its transparency radical without sounding like you weren't paying attention.
5. THINK LIKE AN OWNER
Translation
Requests the behavior of an owner — long time horizon, personal financial stake, willingness to absorb short-term pain — from someone holding none of the instruments of ownership.
Owners have equity, information and the right to sell. If the company wanted you to think like an owner in any operative sense, the mechanism for that is well understood and it is called giving people equity. A poster is cheaper.
Five values. Not one of them describes a behavior you could observe someone failing at, which is not an accident — a value specific enough to be violated is specific enough to be evidence. The vocabulary is its own dialect with its own grammar, and once you can hear it, the poster reads less like a statement of belief than like a form someone filled in.
The part that isn't satire
Everything above I made up. Here is something I did not.
In its annual report for the year 2000, Enron published its values. This is the actual text, quoted exactly:
“RESPECT. We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment.
”
And:
“INTEGRITY. We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly and sincerely. When we say we will do something, we will do it; when we say we cannot or will not do something, then we won't do it.
”
Communication got "We have an obligation to communicate. Here, we take the time to talk with one another… and to listen." Excellence got "We are satisfied with nothing less than the very best in everything we do. We will continue to raise the bar for everyone."
The company filed for bankruptcy the following year.
I want to be careful about what that proves, because the easy version of this point is cheap. It does not prove that everyone at Enron was lying when the document was drafted. Someone wrote that respect paragraph, and for all I know they meant it completely.
What it proves is narrower and much worse: the document was capable of being simultaneously beautiful and irrelevant, and nothing in the process that produced it could tell the difference. It is the same machinery that lets an earnings call say a great deal while disclosing almost nothing — fluent output, no connection to the thing it describes. There is no version of "we do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment" that would have been rejected as inconsistent with what the company was actually doing, because nothing checked. The values statement and the operating reality were running on separate tracks that never touched.
That's the actual finding, and it generalizes.
The correlation is approximately zero
You don't have to take Enron as the case study, because someone measured the general version.
Donald Sull, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, analyzed 500 major U.S. companies as part of the Culture 500 project, comparing each company's officially published values against what employees actually said about the company on those same dimensions.
75% of those 500 companies had a published list of core values. And then:
“The correlation coefficient between how heavily a company weighted a set of values and how well employees said they did on those specific values hovered around zero.
”
A correlation near zero is a stronger result than a negative one would be, and it's worth being precise about why. A negative correlation would mean values statements are inverted — that companies loudly claim what they most lack, which is the cynical folk theory and would at least make the poster informative. Zero means something bleaker: the poster carries no information about the company in either direction. You cannot predict anything about a workplace from its wall.
Which raises the obvious question. If it predicts nothing, why does every company have one?
The turn: it was never addressed to you
Here's what I think is actually going on, and it took me a while to stop being angry about it long enough to see it.
The poster has an audience, and you're not in it.
Its real readers are: a lawyer establishing that expectations were communicated. A recruiter who needs a culture section on the careers page. An enterprise customer's procurement questionnaire with a supplier-ethics field. An investor deck's governance slide. A board that must be seen to have set a tone.
Every one of those readers is served better by vagueness. "Integrity" satisfies the procurement field. "We escalate pricing disputes to a named partner within 48 hours" would satisfy it too, and could then be breached. Specificity creates obligation. Vagueness creates coverage. The poster is drafted to the standard of the reader who can sue, not the reader on the stairs.
So the annotations above are a category error, deliberately — I've been reading a compliance artifact as though it were a promise. It's the same mistake as reading a job posting as a description rather than a disclosure written for readers with more power than you, and the same mistake as reading an org chart as a map of who decides things.
That's the honest complaint, and it's sharper than "companies are hypocrites." Companies are not being hypocritical. They are producing exactly the document their actual audience requires, and the fact that it happens to hang in your stairwell is incidental — a distribution accident, not a message.
The reason this still costs you something: the poster is used against people even though it was never written for them. "Bias for action" appears in performance reviews. "We're a family" appears in the conversation about the weekend. A document with no predictive power about the institution retains full rhetorical power over the individual, and that asymmetry is the whole injury.
The values don't bind the company. They're just available to it.
How to read one
- 1
Ask what each value would look like violated
The only question that matters. "Integrity" — what's the fireable version? If nobody can name it, the value has no operative content. Real values are constraints, and a constraint you cannot breach is decoration.
- 2
Check which direction it flows
For each one, ask: does this ask something of the company, or of me? Genuine values cost the institution something — a deal turned down, a client fired. If all five run one direction, you're looking at an obligations list with a nicer typeface.
- 3
Find the version with a number in it
"We respond to security reports within 72 hours" is a value. "Integrity" is a mood. Numbers can be missed and missing them can be noticed, which is precisely why they're rare on posters and common in contracts.
- 4
Watch when it gets quoted
Track the occasions someone invokes a value out loud for six months. If every instance is directed downward — at a person, during a correction — you have measured the document's real function far more accurately than by reading it.
- 5
Read the layoff memo against the poster
The strongest available test, and it runs itself. When reductions come, put the announcement beside the values. "We're a family" beside a restructuring paragraph tells you everything, and that grammar is worth learning to read line by line — because it is the same grammar every time.
Aren't there companies where the values are real?
Yes, plenty, and the piece would be dishonest if it implied otherwise. But notice what's true of those companies: you can name the decision the value cost them. The client they dropped, the hire they didn't make, the quarter they ate. Real values have a bill attached, and people inside can point at it. That's the whole test, and it's why the Sull result isn't a claim that culture doesn't exist — it's a claim that the poster doesn't predict it.
Isn't it unfair to hold up Enron, the most extreme case imaginable?
It's the strongest objection here, and it's partly right — Enron is a tail event and no argument should rest on it. Which is why the load-bearing evidence in this piece is Sull's 500 companies, not Enron. Enron is doing a narrower job: proving that a values statement can be eloquent, formally adopted, published in an annual report, and completely disconnected from operations, with nothing in the drafting process capable of detecting that. The typical case isn't fraud. It's irrelevance, and irrelevance is what the correlation actually measures.
If the poster is meaningless, why does reading it this way matter?
Because it stops being meaningless the moment it's quoted at you in a review. A document with zero predictive power about the institution retains full rhetorical force against the individual, and knowing that it's a compliance artifact rather than a promise changes how you answer. "Where has the company shown bias for action recently?" is a fair question, and it's only askable by someone who understands what the document is.
Should companies just stop publishing values?
Not necessarily — several of the audiences are legitimate, and a procurement questionnaire genuinely does need answering. The narrow argument is that the artifact should stop being addressed to two audiences at once. A compliance document can live on the compliance page. What goes on the stairwell wall, if anything goes there, should be the small number of specific commitments the company is willing to be held to, with numbers, and there are usually about two.
The stairwell
I go up that way sometimes now, deliberately, which I recognize is a strange hobby.
The poster hasn't changed. The water damage has crept up maybe a centimeter. And what I've stopped feeling when I look at it is the specific irritation of being lied to, because I no longer think I am the one being addressed — I'm reading someone else's mail, taped to a wall, in a stairwell nobody walks through.
The thing that would genuinely unsettle me is a poster with a number on it. One sentence, one threshold, something the company could be caught failing. I've never seen one. Not once, at any company, in any stairwell.
That absence is not an oversight. It's the product working exactly as specified.
It's just business.
Sources
- Enron Corp., 2000 Annual Report — 'Our Values'
How this was checked
The company's own published values, quoted verbatim: Communication, Respect, Integrity and Excellence, including 'We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment.' Enron filed for bankruptcy the following year.
- MIT Sloan — '3 common myths about work culture', on Donald Sull's Culture 500 analysis
How this was checked
500 major U.S. companies; 75% published core values; the correlation between how heavily a company weighted a value and how employees rated it on that value 'hovered around zero'.
- MIT Sloan Management Review — Culture 500
How this was checked
The underlying project measuring corporate culture across more than 500 large U.S. companies using employee review data.
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This article is educational and satirical content from Business Dog. It is not financial, legal, or tax advice. It's just business.