Corporate social responsibility is a perennial topic of interest here at BLPB, and, in particular, the question whether corporations – especially publicly-traded ones – can in fact credibly commit to a non-profit-seeking goal.

Which is why I found this Financial Times column so hilarious.  Lucy Kellaway gathered the “values” statements from 24 different British companies – you know, statements like “We stand for innovation and integrity!” – read them aloud at a conference of the companies’ managers, and asked the managers to identify the statements from their own companies.  Only 5 were able to identify their own company, and in 3 cases, it was because they’d been the ones to draft them in the first place.  The remaining nineteen managers picked the wrong one.

From this, Kellaway concludes that values statements are useless – and she notes that among FTSE100 companies, not having a values-statement is correlated with higher share prices. 

I’d reframe it, though, and say that a values statement – or any corporate declaration of commitment to values – is useless unless it’s backed by real content.  It has to be operationalized in specific terms that are credibly communicated to employees.  The problem with the values statements that Kellaway describes is that they are so generic as to be meaningless – suggesting that the companies themselves were simply using them as PR, to cloak themselves in good feelings without any actual change in the underlying business (and ineffective PR, if you can’t tell one from the other – the companies should at least borrow from Google’s playbook and choose something more memorable, like “Don’t Be Evil”).

And on another note, in honor of the season, here is Sally Richardson, the winner (loser?) of Tulane Law’s Halloween costume drive – the professor with the most student donations has to teach class in costume: