Most companies have corporate values. Most companies get them wrong. In episode 4 of “On the Same Page,” Shel and Steve look at what works, what doesn’t, and why, with examples and tales from their own experiences.

Transcript:

Steve Crescenzo

Hey Shel.

Shel Holtz

Steve, how you doing?

Steve Crescenzo

Doing good, doing good. We’re doing this on a record I’m doing this on a Saturday, which is fun. well, I mean it’s it’s what else am I gonna do? It’s too early to drink, so what yeah, this is this is good time spent. but I’m really glad I’m excited about our topic. More importantly this this week. we decided to talk about values, corporate values. And I think there’s there’s two camps of people when it comes to values. There’s people that really believe they can drive the culture and affect how people feel at work and how they work and how they treat each other and

Shel Holtz

Yeah, is it?

Steve Crescenzo

All that good stuff. you know, and there are companies where that happens. I I’m not gonna say there’s none. Second camp is people who just think they’re completely worthless and they just are posters on a wall and nobody pays attention to them, nobody can name what they are. And I’m in the third camp. I think they do some damage at some a lot of companies for two reasons. Number one, they’re they’re too generic. You look at it, I could pull up any and it’s it’s integrity, respect, excellence, agility. Teamwork, putting people for you it’s all the same crap. So it’s so generic that everyone just agrees with them, and of course who’s not gonna agree with that? the second thing though is that if you don’t live your values, if it’s I I go into so many corporate communications departments at companies where one of the values is innovation, and their intranet looks like it’s from nineteen ninety five. they’re not innovative. they’re in a you know, so agility, no no. Transparency, absolutely not. Not so you gotta poster on a wall with this list of stupid words, and everybody sees what’s in front of them and says, That’s not us. That’s not us. So I think they actually might do more harm than good.

Shel Holtz

Well l let me read you some corporate values. these are from one company, these are their values integrity, respect, excellence, and teamwork.

Steve Crescenzo

For the swords I said. Who’s it?

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. You see anything wrong with those, other than the fact that they’re generic?

Steve Crescenzo

I I think that’s great. I’m glad they operate that way. That’s great. you making

Shel Holtz

Yeah, well that’s Enron. Yeah, it is. Liv they were literally Enron’s values. excellence and teamwork.

Steve Crescenzo

teamwork. That’s classic. Yeah, that’s that’s my experience too. I I’m I’m with that I’m with I’m with that example.

Shel Holtz

Well, we will talk about that. We will talk about your other issues too, because I think they’re spot on. But I do believe that when it’s done well and done right, they can really rock an organization.

Steve Crescenzo

Not gonna disagree with that, but let’s talk about it.

Shel Holtz

So before we jump into the values discussion, I did want to share one comment we got over on LinkedIn where I shared the last episode where we talked about employee voice. This is from Vincent Bruneau, who is commenting pretty regularly on our show and also on my other podcast for immediate release. and he’s always got he’s he’s he’s got great stuff. I I I want to know more about him. but he says in terms of employee voice, the most effective employee listening strategies don’t start with asking more questions. They start with demonstrating that previous feedback led to meaningful change. When people can see the connection between their input and organizational decisions, participation becomes much easier to sustain. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Absolutely. That’s why that’s the point you made, is that we don’t have a survey fatigue. We have a nothing happens when we take a survey fatigue.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, the way I heard it at a conference was it’s it’s not survey fatigue, it’s bullshit fatigue. yak because if we if we survey you and then don’t tell you what the survey results were or how things are changing as a result of that, that’s bullshit.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, you know, Cindy does probably, you know, she’s she’s our measurement arm of Crescent Communications. She does, you know, fifty surveys a year. And her first question is, Why are you asking that question if you don’t if you if you it’s ac if you don’t have the power to change something? And they do it. They load the survey up with a j a wish list of things and they can’t change any of it. And they still ask and nothing happens and then they do it again the next year.

Shel Holtz

And nobody wants to take that survey. Right. Yeah. All right. So let’s jump into values. And I think a good place to start is what are corporate values supposed to be? And the way I see it, the way I’ve always heard that values are supposed to be presented to employees, is these are the underlying beliefs that drive decisions and behavior in the company. These are the things that we believe. And how do you get to that? I I I think, you know, first of all.

Steve Crescenzo

Right, exactly.

Shel Holtz

It has to be shared between the leaders and the employees. Nothing is going to turn employees off more than leadership coming to them and saying, hey, everybody, these are our values. And employees look at it and say, well, first of all, I don’t see those values reflected in decisions or behaviors. And second of all, they’re not my values. I worked for an organization once and I left them in 1993. They have changed owners a couple of times. I don’t think anybody is there. Who was there when I was there? So I’m going to go ahead and name them. It was Allergan, a pharmaceutical company. where yeah, they came up with the values and and I wasn’t involved. I was director of communications, but this was like the executive committee. And they came to me and said, we’ve decided these are the corporate values, go communicate these. And I looked at them and I I said, do we have employee buy-in on these? And they almost literally said, Employee buy-in, hey, this is my way or the highway. If they don’t like these, they can go work somewhere else.

Steve Crescenzo

I remember that. Yeah. my God. Shell, so we’ve done this kind of work with five or six companies over the years, mission, vision, and values. And you know, our we they they hired us to help them write these statements in these words. And our thing was we always said, we’re not gonna do it unless we can talk to employees first. We’re gonna do focus groups. So this company sent us to London, Paris, Singapore. We did focus groups globally to get to the mission, vision values, what people really believed, what was in their core, what brought them to work every day. You know, we did. Cindy led the focus groups and she’s good at that, and we got such great stuff. Then it came time to present it to the C suite. This was a big company. And here’s why everything ends up sucking so bad. It’s all written by committee. Like we we gave them three great examples pulled from their own employees that were unique. You couldn’t pull them out and give them to any other company. They were, they were good. And by the time we walked out of that half day session, they had been watered down. Because yeah, you had eight eight guys in there, eight guys and two women, and they all had their own ideas and they all just wanted to be safe. Well, safe. Yeah, they all always default to safety. Like, let’s just be safe. That’s why you get integrity. Who’s gonna argue with integrity? Transparency, who’s gonna argue with that? Well, by the time I d I don’t even know what they ended up with, but I know that they watered it way down from what we gave them. And our communications people loved it. Our clients loved us. We worked with them again and again and again. But when you’re up against that C suite in that that lemming like thing like to not take a chance to just be safe and you know and they wanna be kinda corporate and we gotta be serious and that’s where it all falls apart. It’s writing by committee. You wanna have values. I mean it just it’s really hard.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and another place this falls apart is what you mentioned at the outset, which is that the behaviors don’t match the values. I’ll tell you, I was doing a focus group with employees of a technology company. It was in their Los Angeles office. They’re headquartered up here in Silicon Valley, but this was in their LA office. And their values were printed on the back of the security badge that they all wore on lanyards around their necks. And I said, What do you think about those? And they laughed. I literally laughed out loud. And I said, Okay, tell me about that. And one of them turned his badge around and he read off the values. He says, You see all of these? There was a guy who was just promoted to executive vice president and he violated every single one of these. He he he got the car and the stock options and the huge bonus potential. And he violated every one of these, but he blew his numbers away. So

Steve Crescenzo

Ha ha.

Shel Holtz

Every employee in this company knows that we can do what these things say or we can do what gets us ahead based on what we see actually happen in the organization. And that’s where values become a source of incredible cynicism and derision.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, yeah, I I I can I I can tell three or four different clients that we’ve had. One of the one of the values was transparency. no, I’m sorry, one of the values was innovation. I have a transparency story too. was innovation and ri risk taking. You know, that was the that was in the values, that was in the then we did focus groups with employees and they’re like, You’re they’re out of their mind. If you make a mistake around here, you’re punished. Like I and you’re not gonna you’re you’re not allowed to fail forward. You’re not allowed to try things. I mean, you’re you supposedly are. But you’re gonna spend time and money doing something, you’re gonna go after what you know is gonna work. You’re where they’re not being innovative. So it’s it’s preached up here at the top, and it’s not happening down there. The other one is transparency, right? Everyone’s got that one lately. I was working for a big oil company, and transparency was one of the values, and I was doing focus groups, and everyone kept saying it I we just don’t feel leadership is transparent. We don’t think they’re transparent. Transparent, we don’t think it kept coming up. The number one theme out of like fifteen focus groups. So I go to give my report to the communicator and he loves it. Then we got to take it to the next level to a bit one of the leaders, not yet the big guy. And he looks and he goes, stops me like six slides in and says, You’ve already mentioned lack of transparency three times, and that’s not the case. I said, Well, that that’s what I heard. I mean, I I did fifteen talking, I talked to 110 people or whatever. And he goes, No, that’s not the case though. They’re they just don’t understand what we’re telling We we are very transparent. I’m like, all right, I can see exactly how much good this audit’s gonna do. And it’s just it’s it’s so it just doesn’t happen up there often enough to make a difference down here where people are doing the work.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and you know, when you’re sharing things transparently, and I this is a bit of a digression. It also needs to be relevant. I did work with a media company whose name everybody listening or watching this podcast would recognize in a heartbeat. And I was interviewing their CEO, who’s very famous, and he said, we actually don’t need employee communications. He says, you know, the cachet of working here. Is is all we really need because people go out at night and say, I’ll tell you when we stop recording. But I went out and did the focus groups and I heard the same thing i i in every focus group. and what they were saying was they keep talking to us about our international expansion. And I am a producer on a US-based show.

Steve Crescenzo

Well now I I don’t know who it is.

Shel Holtz

International expansion doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not going to be involved in that. There are other things I want them to be transparent about. I don’t ever hear about that. And then what they said was every year we’re told what our financial goals are. And from January to October, everything is great. Everything is rosy. we get these all company updates where they tell us how wonderful everything is. Then in October, we’re far behind budget and we have to

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

Take measures to to to fix things. And I asked this of the CEO when I had my follow-up call with him. And he said, Well, if we told employees what was going on earlier in the year, in 10 minutes it would be on the related blogs and all of this stuff would be out in public and it would affect our share price. And I said, Okay, so your employees don’t trust you. And you don’t trust your employees, but you don’t need employee communications. Yeah, it was that was a I I went in there thinking that was going to be a fun gig and it it it ended up being really, really challenging. But anyway, another problem with values is a lot of leaders make them aspirational. You know, so employees in the focus group say they’re not transparent. And leadership says, No, that’s what we’re working toward. That’s not values, right? That’s a maybe a strategic plan.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah. No, no, no, no. That’s that could be a vision. That could be yeah, something else, but it’s not values are how what we do every day right now. What are our values?

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What are the what are the beliefs that underscore everything that we do, every decision, the way we behave, the way we treat each other? You mentioned innovation. Innovation is one of the values at my company, but it’s real. Nobody doubts this. We do very complex, yeah, we yeah, we do very complex things that other, you know, some of our competitors turn down these projects, saying that can’t be done.

Steve Crescenzo

no, that’s what yeah.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, we we did one it was a hotel in San Francisco that we built and the footprint was ridiculous. There was no place for staging. you had a building right abutting where the back was and two abutting where the side was like a vacant lot between two high rises and the building on the street behind it, right there. no place to put a crane. I mean, all kinds of issues and we innovated ways. To do I’ll tell you one great innovation story if I can digress a little on this. We we built the California Academy of Sciences, and there were two things in that building that were challenging. And one of them was that we needed fire suppression systems in a not a vacuum-sealed room, but you know, an airtight room. And this ended up being a challenge. And somebody said, Well, you know, who lives in that kind of environment is people on submarines. So we went to a submarine manufacturer to find out how they did it. the other one was in this simulated rainforest. Yeah, the other one was the rainforest it in this dome had this sort of curving walkway that you could it it started at the top and winds its way down. And you see, there’s no stairs that do this. What does it? And somebody looked at the design and said, you know what it looks like?

Steve Crescenzo

That’s that’s that’s cool. That’s a great story. That yeah, I’m

Shel Holtz

It looks like a roller coaster. So we worked with a roller coaster company on this walk. So this is things other people go, we you can’t do that. And that’s innovation. And you know I that’s relevant to the people in the organization. And yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah, you know so we we were lucky enough to do work with Sandia Labs. and you remember any old days Dan Dan Baum? He wrote he wrote like a funny corporate column in the in the in the Sandia Lab News. And he was like a Mike Roykko level comic columnist. But anyway, I digress. He’s retired. But we went on there innovation’s one of their values, and of course Sandia Labs. They’re they’re making weapons and and they’re

Shel Holtz

I did some work with Seth. They’re great. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

They have to be innovative, right? So innovation’s all over the place and it’s a value and it’s it’s really driven into the DNA. But then what w if you had to guess in the United States, what’s the most innovative healthcare organization in the in the United States?

Shel Holtz

Mayo clinic would would come to the top of my mind. Mayo clinic. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

If you think Mail Client? Yeah, exactly. That’s one of our clients. And there’s a one he’s retired now, I think, but think he retired just last year. Hoy Cinemore was one of the best corporate editors in in my in in that I’ve ever stated him. He was a brilliant writer, brilliant editor. And he go and he and he measured everything. Every article he would measure the you know, everything. How long they stayed in the page, metro opens, clicks, w everything. He goes, Steve, if I ever want to guarantee that nobody reads a story that I write. somebody else writes, I’ll put the word innovation in the headline. It’s just so beaten to death. It’s beaten to death. And Mail Clinics as innovative as anybody gets, but they don’t talk about it all the time. They they just tell stories. They they would tell that story. And they might say the word innovation in there, but they don’t constantly talk about how innovative we are because

Shel Holtz

No, no, no. You can’t beat people over the head with this stuff. in our internal comms department, we have a test. What value or values does this article reinforce? Doesn’t mean we put the value in the headline or even in the story. But it has to align with at least one of in some way. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

I love it. Shut up. And I have seen companies in the in the employee on the internet, back when back in print even, that have a little icon for each value and they would just stick the icon next to it. So it wasn’t in the headline, it wasn’t like that, but it it was a way to kind of reinforce that, you know, these things matter. This is th this is this is what we’re saying and this is how we’re working and that’s how they blend together.

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the other thing that I like about where I work is that I know because I’ve been in the room a few times, that the executive leadership tests decisions against the values. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

That’s awesome. So that’s a g that’s great. I mean, if that more people did that, they wouldn’t be so either useless or harmful. When I was doing the focus when Sydney was doing the focus troops for that large company globally, one of the things she would ask was now we’re gonna talk about now I want to talk about values. We talk about mission, vision, values, but you know, corporate values is a very strange concept, she would say, because there’s fifty thousand people in this company. How can they possibly all have the same values? Now think about your personal values. Which what are your values, Shell? I know yours. You’re you’re kind, you’re a deadhead, you take care of people, you mentor people, you’re generous. Those are your values. Always have been, always will. not everybody has those values. I would argue that certain politicians today certainly do not have those values. So a value should I why what do I a value is valuable when it forces choices. You know what I mean? Like it’s gotta force choices.

Shel Holtz

Exactly.

Steve Crescenzo

If you’re if one of your values is transparency, there are going to be some leaders that don’t agree with that and they may want to go work somewhere else. If one of your values is speed and agility, and you’ve got a worker who is precise and he came from a Swiss watch company and he’s not the kind of worker that likes to go move fast and break things, as all the tech bros say. Like they should values should force people to make decisions. Like, is this the kind of company I want to work with?

Shel Holtz

Well, it should force leadership. It should force leadership to make decisions too. And there’s there’s a great example one you know, one of the archetypal crisis communication examples, case studies, is the Tylenol tampering. It was right there in Chicago where you live. and yeah, you know, it’s taught in every business school. we look at that through rose colored glasses. I was talking to somebody who was there at Johnson and Johnson

Steve Crescenzo

Right. Well yeah, that’s the main thing. god, yeah. on there, yeah.

Shel Holtz

At the time that happened. And yeah, it was was saying, you know, everybody says this was this immediate thing that the board decided, that the executive team decided. It actually took three days and it took a lot of harping from I can’t remember his name, but he ran PR back then in the company. But what he kept telling them was, you know, because they they only wanted to pull the product in Chicago. You pull it nationwide, that’s a real hit to earnings. that’s going to affect the shareholders, and that’s bad.

Steve Crescenzo

really?

Shel Holtz

and his point, well, he had two points. One was if there’s an incident outside of Chicago, it’ll kill us if we leave the product on the shelves. But the other thing is, if you look at our credo, they called it a credo, but it was their values, it was their beliefs, was that our patients come first, our employees come second, the communities in which we operate come third, and shareholders come last. And if we pull

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

product only in Chicago and leave it up when there’s a risk in the rest of the country, that’s not what we say our values are. We’re putting the shareholders first. So they ended up agreeing. They pulled the product nationwide. They took a huge hit to their bottom line, but they innovated the safety seal. They reintroduced the product with a safety seal. No other pain reliever had this. Not only did they get their own customers back, but they got a bunch of customers who had been buying competitor

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, good.

Shel Holtz

Products because the competitors didn’t have safety seals. Shareholders made out like bandits. Take care of your customers, take care of your employees, and the bottom line will take care of itself, you know. but you have to live your values. And I think this is why crisis tabletop exercises at least twice a year are so important because it builds the muscle memory when you’re in the midst of a crisis and have to make decisions really fast. You have to test them against your values. Right? I mean value should cost something.

Steve Crescenzo

without a doubt. Values should cost something. Like I I don’t know what Target’s values are. but I’m sure I’m I’m sure they’re I’m sure somewhere in there I’m sure they violated them when they didn’t speak up what was happening in Min Minneapolis. I’m quite sure that they value they they violated seven or six six or seven of their values. you know what you know who actually get another copy that gets it right, Shell is right in your neighborhood and you might not like because they, you know, they’re utility and nobody really likes the utilities. And they they yeah, PG and E. We’re doing a lot of work with them right now. through with Brad Whitworth over there and and the rest of the team. And we went out there and we gave a speech to 600 of their managers. And Patty Poppy is the CEO, and she led off. And then I fought we follow Cindy and I followed her, and she was just fantastic. I I I’ve been blown away by some really special CEOs in my life. mostly I’m disgusted by them, to be honest. but this one she blew me away. She was so transparent.

Shel Holtz

P G and E.

Steve Crescenzo

And real and authentic. And the 600 managers, you could just tell the that the culture in that room was vibrant and it was there. And you know, they they have values, and their values are their values are very actually very unique. They’re what was it? I forgot curiosity. There there were good values. but they also have you you talked a little bit about values being aspirational. So they have their values, which are cool, curious. all sorts of i I’ll remember later. but then they have what they call their stands. That’s this is what we’re gonna we’re gonna where we’re gonna take a stand, what we’re gonna make a stand on. And their stands are everyone and everything is always safe. If everyone you work for utility, well Shell, you’re in construction. Everything is safety, right?

Shel Holtz

yeah. S yeah, second most dangerous occupation in the country is is construction. Oil and gas.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, I don’t with the first. well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So everyone and everything is always safe. Aspirational, right? Catastrophic wildfires shall stop. It’s almost like biblical. Is it it is enjoyable to work with and for PG and E. Clean and resilient energy for all. Our work shall create prosperity for our customers and investors. You know what? I would look at that if you didn’t know I didn’t know the backstory there and who she is and what she does. I’d be like, that’s they’re full, that’s just words, words. But they’re not with her. They’re not. They they she

Shel Holtz

Yeah. But they’re also not values. They’re they’re not trying to convince people this is what we this these underscore our behavior and activity today. They’re they’re aspirational and they’re separating those from their values. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Exactly. And that’s that’s why I love it. And then but then the the values come into play and then the the strategic initiatives are tied to those two things and it’s all very mapped out and and smart and it makes makes a difference. I mean the the employees feel c connected. And you know what’s funny is when Patty Poppy came on board there, you know, they were losing money, they were they were in dire straits, they had gone through some I think lawsuits or whatever, I don’t even know. but she goes, If you came here for me just to turn the books around, I’m not your girl. I’m not your I’m not your person. I’m here to change the culture of this company. And she did. And that’s why I feel bad saying all values suck, because when they’re right, like Southwest Airlines used to get it right. I’m not sure if they still do. When they used to get it right, I remember having dinner with Ginger Hard, she just passed away recently. Did you hear that?

Shel Holtz

I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear that.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, I saw it on LinkedIn. She was a wonderful woman. She headed up all of employee communications for Southwest Airlines. And I had dinner with her once. And I said, What is it about you guys with this weirdo Kool-Aid drinking culture? Why are your people so nice on the flights? Why do people seem to love working here? And she gave it, went back to Herb Kellerher, of the CEO, the founder. And they said, because Herb always said, every other company says the customer’s always right. We’ve always said our employees are right, and then we trust them to take care of the customer.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, she was.

Steve Crescenzo

And that was a value and employees got that. And I mean y it can make a difference if it’s community if it makes something to begin with that came from employees and it’s communicated properly, it can make a world of difference.

Shel Holtz

I I I heard a story. I I don’t know if this is apocryphal or if it really happened, but there was a marketing team brought into Southwest. They did the dog and pony show for their their marketing slogan, and you know, they had the the big reveal and Herb Callaher and the board is there, and Callaher’s kind of looking at it, and he’s grimacing and and he says, You guys don’t get it. Here’s here’s our slogan: smiles on faces, butts in seats, money in the bank.

Steve Crescenzo

Now that’s real. That’s cold. I love that.

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Hey Steve, I got one more thing I wanna talk about with values, but before we do, I wanna let everyone know that this episode of On the Same Page is sponsored by the strategy studio. Why don’t you tell us about that?

Steve Crescenzo

Just a couple of seconds, not an ad necessarily, but we started the str Crescenso Communications. My wife Cindy, myself, and Zach started the strategy studio. Our son, Zach. Start we started it about a year and a half ago. And it is a private community paid, but a drop in the bucket compared to going to even one conference or one one webinar, even. we got about 140 people in there now, and we share ideas in there. We do weekly live sessions. So we we just did one, we just interviewed Mary Lou Panzano. On her new book out, Cementing Change. She’s a board member of the studio. So we talked to her for an hour. We do live interviews. We do a lot of trainings on things like AI and content creation and measurement and strategy and planning and weekly live sessions. You know, they’re 20 minutes, they’re 25 minutes, micro trainings, so you can do it over lunch. And then we have we have the water cooler thread in there where people just go out there and say, It just happened last week. Someone goes, Hey, I’m thinking about proposing these changes to my employee newsletter. My boss is gonna be a little skeptical. Any advice? 20 people get out there and say, Yeah, do this, do this. And they’re just like sharing stuff all the time. So would love to have anybody listening join the studio. And here it is. Constrategy studio dot com.

Shel Holtz

Higher, higher, higher up. There it is, yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

All right. Check it out. Check out our check out our website, crescendo dot com, and if you wanna you can get there from there too. So yes, we’re so proud to sponsor this because you’re my mentor. Not everybody gets a chance to talk to their mentor twice a month. That’s really cool. So thank you for having me again.

Shel Holtz

Out. Yeah. my pleasure, and you’re my mentor too. you mentioned you mentioned AI. So now I have two things to talk about before we wrap this up. Yeah. Well, this is this will be pretty quick, but AI is really the values test right now. You know, I mean there are companies that are laying people off and claiming it’s AI. How do you message that? are you disclosing what is machine generated? These are all, you know, values decisions in disguise, aren’t they?

Steve Crescenzo

Haha Well I knew and I should have got you off out of God damn it. Absolutely. Yeah, I d absolutely. I think companies are really gonna struggle with it. I really do. And here’s another ethical AI thing that has to do with values. You have all employees are equal, right? All associates are equal, all partner, whatever you wanna call your employees. Well we’re seeing with a lot of our clients is the only AI they’re allowed to use at work is Copilot, right?

Shel Holtz

yeah, because they were already Microsoft Office three sixty five customers. Yeah, yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So they can only use copilot, but there’s two versions of copilot. There’s a standard version that comes with it and everybody gets that kinda. But then they have Microsoft copilot enterprise, which costs money. And that’s where you get the stored memory, that’s when you can train it, that’s where AI gets powerful.

Shel Holtz

It’s it it it it maintains all the inputs from your queries. It doesn’t share that, yeah. So

Steve Crescenzo

Absolutely. So it’s a whole d it’s two two different tools. and we have communication teams that we’re working right now where two of them have the enterprise version and five of them don’t. it’s gonna create a a have and have not world here because they gotta pay for each individual ticket. So it’s like Willie Wonka’s golden ticket. So how can you tell values, get back to values, how can you tell your employees they’re all valued equally and everyone’s great and we respect diversity, blah blah blah. And then you’re giving two people a professional advantage.

Shel Holtz

Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

And you can’t afford to give the I mean, that’s gonna be a big deal. Come on, why mark my words?

Shel Holtz

absolutely. The only way you can get away with that is if you say we’re piloting it right now and we have a a group of pilot testers. Yeah, there’s another one that tests the values here, and that’s where you say the only thing you’re allowed to use is co-pilot, and then you hear that the CEO is using Claude and the the the president is using Chat GPT. Yeah, so that that’s another one. The the the other thing I wanted to mention though is the importance of values in recruiting, because people who are looking for a job, especially coming out of college, but pretty much anybody looking for a job.

Steve Crescenzo

Right, yeah, right.

Shel Holtz

is looking for a company whose values align with theirs. We’ve we’ve had people join us coming from some of our competitors. Why are they coming? culture. And what drives culture? Values.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah. No, you’re right. I think it is a dis a d a dis distinctive thing. I think it can set a company apart. I mean, especially nowadays, people are just more into their own values. It’s like we’re not that’s fifties or sixties where we just went to a company, you worked fifty years, you got your watch, and you went home. People are jumping and around and moving around and taking different and they they can go to I don’t know how long it’s gonna last, but they put values values matter to them. They don’t want to work for a company they don’t believe in.

Shel Holtz

No, they really don’t. So for everybody out there working on their values, let us know how you’re approaching this.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, we’d love to hear. If you have values that are actually working and that means something, please let us know. I I’m always looking for a great case study to teach in the strategy studio. So I’d love to hear from anybody.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, send an email to FIR comments at gmail.com. You’ll see that we’ll post this when it goes live online on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on on threads, and on Blue Sky, whichever one you’re on. Leave a comment there. Let us know how you’re approaching values or what kind of challenges or struggles you’re facing or what kind of success you’ve had. we want to hear it all. So share it. By the way, you can send us an audio comment. That would be awesome if we could play an audio comment or even a video comment would be great too.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, those are fun. That would be even more fun.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, we’ll see you in a couple of weeks on the next episode of On the Same Page. See you later, Steve.

Steve Crescenzo

All right. Take care, Shel.

The post Episode 4: Are Corporate Values Useless, Harmful, or Necessary appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.