Junk Values: Why Corporate Values Fail and What to Do Instead

Most corporate values are doing active harm. Not because values do not matter, but because organisations have spent three decades recycling the same twenty-four words and wondering why nobody believes them. Erika Clegg, co-founder of Larkenby, creator of the Active Ethos® method and author of Junk Values, joined Mark Blackwell on Arkaro Insights to explain what has gone wrong and what it actually takes to build values that guide real decisions at every level of an organisation

The Problem Is Not Values. It Is Junk Values.

The modern history of corporate values, as Erika traces it in her book, begins well. Mary Parker Follett, writing in the early twentieth century, understood that people work better when they feel a genuine sense of purpose and contribution, that great leadership instils the capability in those around it to make autonomous decisions, and that values, expressed clearly, are the mechanism by which this happens. Peter Drucker, whose systems and philosophy owe a considerable debt to Follett, said much the same.

Then something went wrong. Somewhere around the mid-nineties, every organisation decided it needed a values statement, and a vocabulary emerged to fill the gap. Integrity. Collaboration. Respect. Excellence. Innovation. The Oxford Character Project, which surveys FTSE 350 companies every four years, found that before COVID the single most common value was integrity, shared by more than half of sizeable companies. After COVID it became collaboration, as leaders watched their cultures evaporate into ironing boards and spare bedrooms and reached for the nearest word.

“They mean nothing out of context,” Erika says. “They are not magnetic. Values should be magnetic, which means they should attract, but they should also repel. You don’t want the wrong people. You don’t want to waste your time.”

The mechanism of failure is painfully familiar. A management retreat. Post-it notes. Five people all write the word integrity. Someone decides that must be one of the corporate values. The chair launches it. Everyone listening gets a little more cynical than they already were. The values poster goes on the wall. Nothing changes. The process has done the opposite of what it was supposed to do.

What Active Ethos® Actually Does

Erika’s Active Ethos® method begins not with values but with diagnosis, what she calls lifting the bonnet. The entry point is almost always a moment of transition: a new chief executive, a generational handover in a family business, a leader who has looked under the hood and found more complexity than expected.

The diagnostic is individual, not collective. Erika speaks to people one by one, from across the organisation and beyond it, including clients, suppliers and others who experience what the organisation is actually like to work with. She deliberately avoids asking people what they think the values are. The question triggers anxiety and produces buzzwords. Instead she asks: what is it like working here? Tell me about a time when things went really well. Who were you with? What did it feel like? Do you still talk about it?

She calls the accumulation of all those stories filling the snow globe. Shake it and it is overwhelming. But eventually the snow settles, and themes emerge, and so does something subtler: mood, personality, vernacular, the specific phrases that people actually use. “What really brings this to life,” she says, “is that the specific phrases I recommend have often been said to me in one of those conversations.”

One of her most telling examples comes from a logistics company. A member of the team, based alone at a supermarket depot, with a new baby at home and a long way from head office, said unprompted: “I love working here because wherever you are, you’re part of the family.” That became one of their values, not as a slogan but as a truth, verified at the furthest possible outpost.

The Ecosystem: Purpose, Vision and Stretch Values

Once the diagnostic is complete, the values do not stand alone. They are part of what Erika calls an ecosystem, and the ecosystem has three components.

Vision is what inspires people to make an effort. Erika uses Winnie the Pooh to explain this. He is affable, not particularly industrious. But he sees the honey, smells it, cannot quite reach it, tries climbing the tree, gets a balloon, paints himself grey to look like a cloud, floats up and gets stung by bees. He makes a massive effort. Why? Because he wants the honey. Your vision needs to be your people’s honey. Not the numbers on the strategy board, not headcounts and percentages, but whatever genuinely moves them.

Purpose comes in two forms. Some organisations need a hammer purpose: blunt, practical, this is what we are here to do. Others need something closer to Maya Angelou’s formulation, a sense of living a rich and fulfilling life, something that elevates rather than specifies. The right answer depends on who the people are.

Stretch values, the third component, are the behavioural principles that give people the autonomy to move towards the vision and purpose. They help people make choices. They are not generic aspirations; they are guides to action. And because the vision and purpose are already in place, people understand why the values exist and what they are for.

“Plant a thousand seeds,” Erika says, “and eight hundred and fifty flowers bloom. You keep going. It becomes intuitive. It becomes embedded. But you have to do a lot of heavy lifting first.”

Churchill's Pig

The best illustration of a value properly brought to life in the conversation is one Erika did not work on herself. Cook, the British frozen food company, has a value called Churchill’s Pig. Winston Churchill reportedly observed that a dog looks up at man, a cat looks down on man, but a pig looks man straight in the eye and sees his equal. Cook named a value after that. They could have said respect. They could have said equality. Nobody would have remembered.

Churchill’s Pig is a value that works because it is fun, specific, utterly on-brand, and impossible to forget. But naming it is only the beginning. Cook has a Churchill’s Pig Week, a year-round email address, founders who hot-desk alongside everyone else, and 90,000 Trustpilot reviews to which they aim to respond within 24 hours, hitting that target 95% of the time. The value lives in behaviour, not on a poster.

This is the distinction Erika draws between a slow value and a junk value. The junk version is produced quickly, sounds reasonable, and evaporates. The slow version, like slow food, takes time, requires patience, and nourishes. “None of this,” she says, “is just about being nice. This is about good business practice. But you’ve got to think long term.”

Why This Matters Now

This thread has been running through Arkaro Insights for some time. In our conversation with Eric Ries, he drew on Follett’s concept of the invisible leader: the idea that purpose embedded deeply enough guides decentralised action without anyone present to enforce it. Stephen Wunker made the complementary argument that AI will drive radical decentralisation of organisational decision-making, and that an aligned heart, a shared sense of purpose and values, is what keeps the distributed intelligence coherent. The 80% to 15% gap he identified, between executives who say AI is core to their mission and employees who believe it, is a values and trust failure as much as a communications one.

Hilary Scarlett’s SPACES model adds the neuroscience: without a clear sense of purpose, the brain defaults to threat mode. Purpose is not a soft aspiration but a neurological necessity, the difference between a team that is calm, focused and creative and one that is, as Mark puts it in his introduction, a Neanderthal running from tigers.

Erica Engelen demonstrated in her episode on adaptive organisations that industrial-era carrot-and-stick incentives have run their course. Intrinsic motivation, which is to say purpose that people actually feel, is what drives sustained performance. Adrian Stratta’s Mission Command framework from the Parachute Regiment makes the same point from a military angle: decentralised decision-making only works when everyone understands the intent clearly enough to act without instruction. James Michael Lafferty’s Mother Rule offers the simplest test of all: if the person at the kitchen table cannot understand your purpose statement, it will never drive action on the ground.

And Juan Aguiriano of Kerry Group closed the loop beautifully: Inspiring Food, Nourishing Life, crowd-sourced from thousands of employees and now a north star reshaping portfolio decisions and driving global investment.

Erika’s Junk Values is shortlisted for the Smart Thinking category of the Business Book Awards 2026.

Listen to the Episode

The full conversation with Erika Clegg covers much more than this article can, including the Nanny McPhee model of how a client engagement actually unfolds, the difference between listening internally and listening externally, and why values processes so often produce exactly the opposite of what they set out to achieve.

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