Why Corporate Values Fail, Who Pays for It, and One Very Famous Hot Dog

Every company has values. They’re on the wall, in the handbook, probably in a custom font. Most of them ‘are bland, toothless, or just plain dishonest.’

In Episode 03, Jo and Kristy get into taxonomy of corporate values and why most companies get them wrong. We break down the Lencioni taxonomy, which has been sitting in the Harvard Business Review since 2002 telling companies exactly what they’re doing wrong and has been cheerfully ignored ever since.

We get into H&M, whose former head of sustainability spent a decade saying all the right things before becoming CEO. The quotes are genuinely extraordinary.

We get into Oatly, which is not a villain story so much as a grief story, and we’re still bummed out for Mr. Science.

And then there’s Costco. We did not plan to end up here. A company so unsexy its entire marketing strategy is currently a CEO eating a hot dog in one take. And yet. Costco turns out to be one of the most genuinely values-aligned businesses in North America right now.

The gap between what organizations say they believe and what they do when it costs something is not usually malicious. It is not even usually cynical. But when it gets wide enough, something breaks that is harder to pinpoint than a lost customer or a bad headline.

Psychologists call it moral injury. We call it Episode 03.

Skeptical but hopeful. Optimism without the b******t.