Toward Successful Corporate Enterprises

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* Ethics are primary.
Ethics are necessary in order to develop trust.
Trust is necessary to sustain business relationships.
Strong business relationships are necessary for results.
Ethics (internally and in dealings with customers) are the foundation of any successful enterprise.

* The buck stops with management.
Management sets the tone.
Management writes (or at least, understands and approves) the documented standards necessary for repeatable processes and high quality results.

* Experiment.
In a good experiment, you and those you share your results with succeed at learning, even if the idea fails.

* Be Good.
You are an example to others, every day.

* Strategy trumps being good.
Not all strategies succeed, but if there is no strategy, you and the company will certainly fail.
If it does not make sense to do something, and it is something likely to be requested beyond just today, then find out why it is being requested.
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All right. Corporate values statements require more than fifteen minutes of thought. Or, maybe not.

This corporate value statement,
which matches in tone what I remember from 2000, sadly for 100+ workers, was destructive. Other factors will no doubt be blamed as well. (The corporation as a whole may have benefitted, assuming this was an experiment that the company learns from.)

Something Deming probably said: "Enterprises succeed through the efforts of everybody. Enterprises fail because of flawed management practices."

Craig Harrison writes well about these sorts of topics.