Justin Stach

Everyone says it differently and nobody says anything

tl;dr Company values are a genre exercise.

Somewhere in the operating manual of modern tech is a rule that a company must publish its values to the world. Not to live them necessarily, but to publish them: on the careers page, between the mission and the benefits, four or five of them (the mean is 4.92), each a few words long with some explanatory text beneath them.

I collected 343 (so far) of these lists from tech companies in the US, UK and Europe, 1,691 values in all, and built a small tool to explore them, because I had a hunch I wanted to test: that values statements, when read carefully, might tell you something true about the company that wrote them. I figured that fintechs would lean on integrity, hardware companies would talk about craft, and consumer companies would name the customer. That these choices would leak.

I was wrong, but in the ‘interesting wrong’ way, rather than the ‘not even wrong’ sort.

The thing that surprised me most: the wording. Of 1,385 distinct wordings in the corpus, 1,256 are used by exactly one company. That’s 90.7%. No two companies of the 343 publish the same list, and the closest any comes is two shared values (Zopa, Contentful and Sila Nanotechnologies all have “own it” and “win together”, which must be awkward at the kind of parties where earnest HR people reveal their values to one another). Seven companies’ values open with the word “say”, and all seven say it differently: "Say it straight, hear no hate”, “Say it as it is”, “Say it how it is”, “Say It”, “Say The Last 10%”, “Say the Thing”, “Say/Do Ratio”. Elsewhere in the corpus you’ll find “Empty the Dishwasher”, “Feel the AGI”, “Enlightened Despots” and, my favourite, Voodoo’s “Share and accept direct feedback”, which is less a value and more a commandment. Voodoo are of course a gaming company… Enormous care has gone into these words. Whoever wrote them worked hard to sound like nobody else.

So then I tested whether the ideas that sit underneath the wording track anything at all. I coded the 1,691 statements into 40 concepts, tagged every company by sector, and ran a bunch more tests.

Nothing. Not “weak signal”, nothing. Concept co-occurrence, or the chance that two coded concepts show up together, sits inside the range you get from reshuffling the deck and dealing again: every company keeps the same number of cards and every concept stays exactly as popular as it really is, so the only thing randomised is who holds what. In fact fewer concept pairs look unusual than chance alone predicts.

Sector predicts nothing either: across all 22 testable concepts and six sectors, 88% of random reshufflings of the sector labels produce a more structured table than the real one. My three predictions all failed, two of them backwards (this is why I tend to work with great analysts, I’m shit at it). Fintechs name integrity at almost exactly the corpus rate. Hardware companies name craft at exactly the corpus rate. And consumer companies turn out to be the second-least likely of the six sectors to name the customer at all. US against UK and Europe: nothing there either.

The flattest line in the whole dataset is the biggest concept. Some version of “one team” or “win together” appears at 157 of 343 companies, 46%, and it runs 44%, 46%, 45%, 47%, 40%, 56% across the six sectors. Whatever a company actually does, about one in two will tell you they do it together.

So what did I learn? The wording of values is bespoke, but the choice of values is more or less random. Companies pour craft into saying what their values mean distinctively but these values are selected from a small common pool; a handful of ideas that carry very little information about what kind of company they are. The median company pulls two of its values from the top-five pool (teamwork, ownership, customer focus, integrity, or ambition) and phrases the rest in words nobody else uses. The pattern is wonderfully consistent too, so much so the next project will be to write a generator to do all this: pick a couple of the big 5, get a random set to complete your hand and then go nuts in the prose. Values pages would seem to differentiate businesses the way house fonts do.

None of this tells you whether any company lives its values; the data is what companies publish about themselves, full stop. But if the individual lists say nothing, the corpus itself says quite a lot, and as in literature, a genre reveals itself in what it cannot include. Across 343 tech companies:

  • 221 never name the people they sell to. No customer, client, user, patient, member, victim or guest. The largest single silence in the corpus.
  • The word “ethic” appears in the values of just one company.
  • Work-life balance and wellbeing. One company uses their whole mouth to say it: Dataiku’s "Work-Life Balance”, and two more are arguable, Strava’s bare “Balance” and Elastic’s “Home, Dinner”.
  • Remote, flexible, hybrid or async: three companies, in a corpus assembled from the careers pages of tech companies actively hiring.
  • AI: ten companies, in August 2026, in a corpus that is almost entirely technology companies.

For scale, “trust” appears at 35 companies and the speed family (fast, urgency, velocity) at 44. Tech companies find it easier to publish a value about moving quickly than to publish one about the buyer, the planet, or going home at a reasonable hour.

I spent two decades inside companies like these and I’ve sat in the workshops where lists like these get made, so I’ll offer the reading I believe rather than pretend neutrality: the values page isn’t a description and was never going to be one. It’s a genre exercise, written to a brief nobody wrote down, and the brief is what my corpus recovered. Sound unique. Draw from the pool. Say “team”. Don’t mention money.

There’s a harder reading, and having sat on both sides of the table I believe it: the values page is the one corporate text that gets quoted back at you. Not the mission, not the strategy deck. When you lose an argument it arrives as “disagree and commit”. In an appraisal it arrives as “not yet demonstrating ownership”. In the budget round, “high agency” and “scrappy” let you know the headcount that isn’t coming. None of that’s in this data so I can’t test it here. But nobody was ever marked down against the mission statement. Values are the corporate text with teeth, which is exactly why so much care goes into keeping them toothless-looking.

Which brings me to the last number, and I’ll leave it with you undecorated. Of 1,687 published values, the number that mention profit, revenue, margin or money at all is three.

One of the three is against it.

The corpus, every value, the concept coding and all the overrides are browsable at Values Explorer. The coding is my reading, not a definitive reading; a tenth of the statements resisted it entirely, and I’d genuinely like to hear where you think it’s wrong.