You’re walking past a conference room, ironically named ‘Transparency,’ on your way to a meeting where you know, deep down, you’ll have to conceal critical details about project delays from a key customer. The fluorescent lights hum a low, unsettling drone, mimicking the one in your own head. Every step feels like a contradiction, a silent argument with the brightly printed mission statement that probably adorns the lobby wall just 48 feet away, proclaiming ‘Integrity’ or ‘Open Communication.’
This isn’t just about a bad day, or a single difficult client. It’s about the pervasive, insidious lie many organizations tell themselves, and more importantly, tell their people. Corporate values, those carefully curated phrases etched into glass or painted onto drywall, are rarely statements of current fact. They are, almost without exception, aspirational. Worse, they are often remedial. The value a company trumpets most loudly-be it ‘Innovation,’ ‘Collaboration,’ ‘Agility,’ or even ‘Customer Centricity’-is nearly always its biggest, most glaring weakness.
A Sign of Underlying Deficit
Think about it. Has any truly innovative company ever needed to shout ‘Innovation!’ from the rooftops 28 times a day? Their products, their processes, their very existence screams it. If a team genuinely collaborates, do they need 18 corporate retreats a year dedicated to ‘enhancing synergistic workflows’? No. They just *do* it. The constant, explicit declaration is a tell, a compensatory mechanism for an underlying deficit. It’s like someone repeatedly stating how honest
