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My Company's Values

Thank you, A-ron, for your help with this post.

One day, at the monthly meeting of the company I was working for, the CEO owner told all employees to write down what he/she would consider the most important thing in life, and text message it anonymously to this one number. The app would gather all of the responses and build a “word cloud”, and the company would base on that results to form the company’s core values. Below was what we got:


“God” was the most common answer, and “family” came second. If you look closely, you can see that the “God” response can arguably be a lot more significant, since there are other similar answers such as “church”, “faith”, and “hod” (which is a typo in case you’re wondering – “g” and “h” is next to each other). So I thought that was really interesting (while comforting): what on earth was the company gonna do about this kind of response? Were we gonna have morning praying times? Would there be weekly Bible studies, company-wide? Considering how non-religious the CEO owner happened to be, I was curious of what we would decide to do.

Later on, it was revealed to us that the company’s core values would now be: Passion; Loyalty; Pride; Integrity; and Trust. Well, that was a lot more generic and politically correct than, say, “God-centered” or “religious”. The 5 chosen values seem like something out of a business textbook, or something an owner would want their employees to go with. That’s why, to be honest, these core values might have had been decided way before we had that company meeting when us employees were bestowed the false sense of democracy. I might be wrong, but I was rather disappointed. A false sense of democracy is so depressing when it’s seen through.

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