Excerpts from Junk Values
The Basics
The world is full of people who say, quite understandably, that values are nonsense and culture is a construct. The world is fuller still of people who, with the very best intentions, prove them right by generating values sets too quickly, without deep reflection or creative input, and then fail to build a successful working culture from them, as they are not effectively worked into the daily life of the organisation.
You may be one of them.
And it’s not just about business values. Personal values allow us to make tough choices with integrity, to shed the dreaded imposter syndrome, to build trust and live a life we can be proud of. If you have words and phrases in mind for your own values – which you are more than welcome to keep secret – then you know, whatever the circumstances, you will act with integrity.
Adventures in Junk
On Friday nights, armed with 50p for a Coca Cola and Youth Hostel cards as dubious proof of age, we swarmed to a nightclub that sold doners with heaps of chilli sauce. On the way home, my best friend and I stopped at the Chinese takeaway for sweet and sour chicken and a spring roll so large that, even in our gluttony, we had to share.
Meanwhile at home, my growing independence was rewarded with a limitless supply of Bird’s Eye boil-in-the-bag curries, Findus crispy pancakes, and low-gravity Belgian stubbies. I once drove 16 miles to get a bag of Frazzles. The hit of fast food retailer packaging, the buzz of the outlets with their clatter, chat and pop music, was matched joyfully by the hit of sugars, salts, fats, and e-numbers.
A year later, university came. Missing out on Cambridge, I hot-footed it to a college that looked like a French chateau on the outskirts of London, my only exercise a regular Chariots of Fire-esque circumnavigation of one of the quads at midnight, pissed. Since I was perpetually skint and you could cash a cheque at the pub, I pretty much moved in. Pints and pints of beer, pie and chips, crisps, and fags; so many tequila shots that on more than one occasion we ran out of lemons and had to use mango chutney.
Loss of Trust
Firstly, you can’t take trust for granted just because you’ve got a high-falutin’ job title. A generation ago, respect and the freedom to make decisions without feeling the need to justify them or deliver them overnight would come with the job. But everything has changed.
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer underlines how far automatic deference has gone. Seven people in ten think CEOs, politicians, and journalists bend the truth. And over half of 18–34-year-olds say hostile activism – anything from online argument to smashing up property – is fair game if they feel ignored. Among the over-55s, it is just a quarter. Titles don’t carry trust anymore; you have to earn it from a folded-arms, prove-it-then audience.
Secondly, you need to doubt, too. Dig deeper into what you are told. Question what you read. Doubt what you see. Be aware of the impact of repeated untruths on your instinctive thought processes, expectations, and decisions. When faced by a consistent onslaught of propaganda, it takes a will of iron to hold your course. But if you want to live with a sense of integrity, to be your best, that’s what you have to do.
Because trust is earned by consistency. Incidentally, that applies just as much to being consistently bad as being consistently good. Think of someone you find morally repugnant. Do they stick to their aims? Can you pretty much guarantee their response to a situation? Like them or not, that means you trust them. That means they have integrity, regardless of whether you agree with them.
Just ask Why
Why are you doing this? Why now? Are you willing to do the hard yards it will take to get this running and keep it going? What are your hopes for the process?
My rules when I work with people and businesses are that we allow no elephants in the room or ostriches with their heads in the sand. If you are conscious that you are uncomfortable with your own answers or with those of others, that those people whose answers have given you pause are in a space that needs further investigation – then keep going.
McKinsey has a technique called the Five Whys. So do toddlers. It means not being willing to take the first answer, instead to keep pushing through until you’re closer to the root of the matter. This you need to deploy as you start to investigate what it is that makes you tick, what makes the business what it is.
What are you looking for?
What you are not looking for is something that diverges entirely from your vision. This is not an abdication of leadership. You know what you need to achieve, you know a lot – though not all – about what’s working, and what’s not working too. As you build up knowledge and insight through this process, you are gaining a deeper understanding of the motivations and concerns of the people you talk to, hearing their language, gauging their characters, and reading between the lines to understand the unspoken.
Having had the courage to dig deep into your own views and hopes, you tackle every other segment of the circle in turn. What are the hard facts of your business, what is your strategy? Looking out to the second circle, what views do those who influence and are influenced by your business bring to it – what are their stories told to you or evident in their communications and what is said about them? And finally the circle over which we have no control, but which can have a great impact on us – the world, and those often catastrophic things that emerge from nowhere and cause us to pivot, the black swans.
Everyone, Everywhere, Everything
When I help companies to establish and work with their values, we cut and dice their business, which enables us to focus on small areas, pilot schemes, and tailored activities. My goal is to move us away from departmental responsibility (‘HR will take it from here’), seniority precedence (‘The guys on the production line will never get it.’), and locational variations (‘Let’s not worry about Argentina, we never see eye to eye.’).
The reason is simple: values cannot be left to one department, one level of seniority or one branch of the organisation.
When values are left to HR, they are seen as an HR initiative, not a business one. This applies just as much to marketing, say, or the senior leadership team – which, after HR, is the most common department saddled with the task of launching the values into actions.
If values are framed as the preserve of seniority, they risk becoming seen as top-down or capped at an upper limit. And when locations and departments are written off, values fracture, creating parallel cultures that quietly compete rather than cohere.
The alternative is to start small and start everywhere. By piloting values across functions led by a widely representative group we see them tested, challenged, and proved in daily practice. That evidence builds trust. It shows people that values are not just a management initiative, but tools for real decisions.