Down with Values! Trying to be useful and a time of transformation
Can we please just stop with the "values” charade?
Have you been following the Sandy Peggie employment tribunal in Scotland?
Women insisting they don’t know if they’re women or not, officials dodging responsibility, institutional rank closing, and allegations of tampering with records. Meanwhile, NHS Fife’s website proudly trumpets its “values.” Three of the nine? Openness, honesty, and responsibility. But, of course.
Regularly I hear stories of organisations where lofty “values” are plastered across websites, lanyards, and reception areas — claims that evaporate the moment a crisis hits or a senior manager or board member feels threatened.
Values Bullshit Syndrome (VBS) is be found in all sectors:
The human rights charity hounding its CEO for challenging a board member’s behaviour. He had the temerity to point to the organisation’s values—one of which, naturally, is Transparency.
A college of higher education where leaders are clawing at each other like ferrets in a sack, whilst publicly proclaiming their devotion to - drum roll - Mutual Respect and Tolerance.
The bank humble bragging that it “acts with empathy and humility”—unless, of course, empathy gets in the way of personal advantage, in which case, knives out.
A so-called impact business trotting out the required litany of values commitments where the culture at exec level was described to me as “the Asshole Olympics.”
You get the picture.
So here’s my modest proposal: let’s delete all this values guff from websites and corporate comms. After all, only people have values (fundamental beliefs which shape behaviour), organisations don’t. So no more Bravery, Authenticity, Transparency, Group Hug, Apple Pie, Blah Blah. Let’s put an end to VBS!
Instead, how about we all simply
Deliver a high-quality service.
Obey both the spirit and the letter of the law.
And not be dicks when the heat is on.
Together we can end VBS.
What now? What for?
“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” Mae West
I recently found myself in a lively, energising conversation with a group of social activists, CEOs, founders, and professional troublemakers—people of all ages and backgrounds. I was representing the cis, heteronormative, old white geezer demographic.
The question we were asked to address was : "At this stage of your life, what are your priorities?"
As I approach my 65th birthday, it's a question I've been circling for a while. I’ve landed on three things:
To be loved and love well.
To stay healthy in body and mind.
To be useful.
On the usefulness front I have recently joined the board of the Jaguar Land Rover Foundation and I’ve started volunteering in my local indie bookshop.
If I can maintain the second of my priorities above, I will carry on with my mentoring practice , advising and encouraging good people caught in the swirl of human and commercial challenges—trying to keep the show on the road without losing their marbles or their marriages. Women such as Myriam Sidibe who learned everything about brands and social change through soap, sex and alcohol as she explained in her recent TED talk.
Meanwhile …. Sudan. Gaza. Congo. Ukraine. Small boats. Big temperatures. A pathological liar in the White House who ‘was right about everything’ and who is being played by a former KGB colonel . In the UK, that rising sense that our basic systems—water, power, transport, immigration—might be beyond fixing in our current governance and fiscal settlements.
We’re drowning in data and starving for insight. There's too much noise, so much volatility. The signal is hard to find. It's tempting to cling to the familiar—to reach for the comfort of old solutions and outdated frameworks.
I fancy myself as the mentor who offers two things: clarity and courage. But what does clarity mean in these times?
Reading The Discernment Framework helped. I like this:
“Clarity is the disciplined capacity to perceive what is structurally meaningful, emergent, and becoming—and to act in alignment with it.”
If you need some help with your clarity and courage do get in touch.
Once a Catholic : Part Two
My piece last time about my Catholic formation went down well with my recovering Catholic subscribers. So, here’s some more:
I left college 1982 with a second class degree and a first-class wife. That August, the two of us set off for Canada as volunteers with a British Columbia-based organisation that recruited young, idealistic Catholics to serve in the schools and parishes of the Diocese of Prince George.
Our assignment took us to Fort St. John on the Alaska Highway in the Peace River Valley.
Our two years in the north were transformative for us. We encountered older American volunteers who introduced us to liberation theology and movements like the Catholic Worker and Sojourners—radically different expressions of faith from the conservative, working-class Irish Catholicism we had grown up with. We were challenged, inspired, and radicalized by the people we met.
Our parish priest, Jack McCann, was a cold and distant figure who kept himself apart from the community. I saw more of him than most—he had satellite TV and we’d watch NBA games together, sharing beer and crisps, cheering on Doctor J and Moses Malone as they led the 76ers to the title.
What I didn’t know then was that McCann was an abuser who would be jailed for child sex offences in 1992. He had been sent to northern British Columbia by his superiors in Toronto to lay low—a sadly familiar strategy by the Church hierarchy to conceal abusers.
Just across the street from McCann in the convent lived Sister G, the principal of the school where Maggie and I taught. She was a kind and compassionate woman, and she took care of us when we arrived—young, far from home and homesick. We learned later that her previous post had been in Guatemala where she had committed herself to the “option for the poor,” standing with the marginalised during one of Central America’s darkest periods.
The brutality of the Guatemalan civil war was unspeakable, even by the horrific standards of the time. One night, returning to her convent, Gabriela found the severed head of a community activist left on the doorstep by a military death squad. After that, her order pulled her out and sent her to the violence free isolation of northern British Columbia.
That small BC parish, tucked away in an obscure corner of the world, embodied both the very worst and the very best of the Catholic Church—a predator in hiding, and a traumatised woman of courage and faith who’d put it all on the line for the poor and oppressed.
***
I spent a couple of weeks in Umbria agog at the breadth and depth of the art and history. In the oratory of the Flagellanti in Perugia, this painting of Jesus being scourged before the crucifixion - painted by Luca Signorelli in the 15th century - is the weirdest and most striking we saw. That shoe.
Wherever you’ve spent your summer—wandering medieval churches or stretched out on a beach—I hope it’s been a good one. You’ve probably earned it. And if you’re plotting next year already, put the Umbria Jazz Festival on your list.
Peace, love and profit.
Liam x