A public sector service provider was about to have a high-level government audit. Panicking, executives realized they had no corporate values, so two highly unsuitable directors in the organization "devised" some over a coffee late at night. What unfolded over the next 18 months was the stuff of a West End farce. They produced numerous mouse pads and posters with the new values on them, and they instructed the staff that this was now what the organization stood for and thought.
Good people are OK about being told what to do, as long as it is reasonable and within their personal value set. What no good person likes is being told what to think. Over those 18 months, before the company called in the Halo Works, it lost 60 percent of its highly skilled and very expensive-to-replace professional staff and about the same amount of the junior staff. The service provider became a pariah within the sector, finding it impossible to attract good people to replace the ones it had...
