Values matter

More than 20 years ago, I was leading a team making a crunch presentation to a client's leadership team. The client was very much a national institution (still is) and we had enjoyed discovering just how important and positive a role it played in UK life. We believed this gave the business unique stature, but also feared that it had become taken for granted within the client team.

When we said that "sustaining trust" should form a central part of the brand strategy, those fears were confirmed by the Strategy Director saying "Well, that doesn't sound very stretching". We replied with two observations. The first was that at least two of our then clients - one a fossil fuel company, the other a High St bank - would love to be able to sustain trust, but instead were looking for ways to build some. The second was to point out that one of this client's subsidiary businesses was currently incentivising its people according to the number of customers it could get into court each month.

The client CEO's response of "It does what?" led to a long, detailed series of discussions, at the end of which the business was divested.

Three years or so later, we were no longer working with the client, and there had been a near-total change of that leadership team. And I wonder what else left at that time.

Now, part of that client organisation is embroiled in a horrible scandal: miscarriages of justice, false accusations, imprisonments, bankruptcies and suicides are truly shocking; and now all sorts of questions are being asked of the culture and priorities in the business. I can't help thinking that somehow that idea of "sustaining trust" was abandoned; or, just as bad to consider, was left as another of those 'values' that get posted on office walls and websites, but are rendered worthless in real life.

Organisations should take the time, and act with the professional integrity, to test what their 'values' should mean and demand, before claiming them. Was it Bill Bernbach who said "It's not a principle until it costs you money"? That's not a bad test. And as for "sustaining trust", it's another example of "It takes years to build, and a second to lose".