There they are on the wall. Framed. Possibly even in plaque form. There are 6 of them. (I don’t know why but corporate values most often seem to come in batches of 6.) They look beautiful. And if you ask any employee in the company s/he can probably name 2 or 3 of them without looking at the plaque. Herein lies the beginnings of the problems with corporate values.

First of all, you can’t change 6 behaviors at once. Have you ever heard someone make 6 New Year’s resolutions? Most people fail to carry out 1. Yet when most companies define their corporate values they offer up more new behaviors than anyone could possibly work to adopt at one time. The people who chose these values know this. So then they take the second step that makes corporate values useless.

They put the values on a plaque, stick them on the walls, and forget about them. And that’s what their employees do too. We all forget them. There’s no reason to do otherwise. After all, they have no bearing on anything we do. Out of sight, out of mind applies even to things that are framed and stuck on the wall. If there is no other reference to the values they will drift quickly into irrelevance.

To make corporate values useful they should be separated into 2 categories.

Commandment Values

Commandment Values are the list of values that you expect everyone to exhibit at some minimum level. For example, we think everyone should act with – Trust, Integrity, Teamwork, Customer Service, Respect, Quality. Behaviors that are obviously contrary to these values will be grounds for discipline and possibly even termination. They set a minimum expectation, a baseline for behavior.

These values are basically what most companies have already created. They are the general list of “traits and behaviors we wish our employees to exhibit.” We don’t closely track them. But they will enter discussions when someone clearly breaks them.

The problem is that these don’t guide exceptional behavior. They simply set the stage for disciplining bad behavior – necessary perhaps, but hardly inspiring. This is why you need the second type of value.

Focus Value

The second type of value is your Focus Value. It is one value from your list of commandment values that will be your focus for some time – I personally like the time frame of 1 year. At any given time, some value will rise to the top, not as most important, but as most pressing. Your company was just hit with insider trading scandals? Focus on Integrity. You’re falling behind more creative competition? Focus on Innovation. Fights between the line and management? Focus on Trust.

This isn’t a dismissal of the other values. It’s a difference in activity. I’m expected not to break any of the Commandment Values. I’m expected to operate within their guidelines. However, I’m not expected to proactively go out of my way on a regular basis to seek ways to act upon those values. I’m simply expected to uphold them as part of my normal everyday activity.

For the Focus Value on the other hand, I’m expected to go out of my way, to seek out new ways to exhibit that value. Once you figure out which is your Focus Value for the year, make it part of everything. Corporate meetings and events should begin with activities or discussions related to the Focus Value. Performance review and development conversations should include the Focus Value. It should be part of your hiring and succession practices. Your Focus Value should be impossible for anyone in your company to forget, and it should be something that everyone in your company feels compelled to act on.

Valuable Corporate Values

This combination of Commandment and Focus Values makes your corporate values useful. It makes them guide behavior in a way that is actually doable. So what if you don’t hold the reigns for your whole company? At the very least, create your own Focus Value for the year and hold yourself accountable to it. My Focus Value for this year is Heroism. Let me know what you choose for yours.

It’s MLK Jr. Day, and so a good day to celebrate diversity. I think it was during the 90s that diversity on a wide scale went from being a simple noun to a social, political, and organizational imperative. As that occurred diversity came to mean that a wide spectrum of non-white males should occupy a substantial percentage of the positions in any given area. That was an important objective that many organizations and groups are still seeking to attain.

Some organizations in the last decade moved beyond the diversity goal of filling positions with diverse people. For these organizations diversity took on a new meaning of tolerance. These organizations do diversity training to help people understand and be more comfortable with not only other gender, races, religions, and sexual orientations, but also plain old opinions. Diversity as tolerance brought the responsibility for a diverse work environment from the hiring manager to every employee.

For the new decade, and for those most advanced organizations, it is time to now overlay another concept on diversity – inclusion. Just as the hiring manager over the last 20 years was expected to seek out diverse applicants, the next imperative is for everyone to seek out diverse participation in whatever they do. This diversity could be along the traditional lines – gender, race, etc – but that isn’t necessarily the point. Inclusion for you could be inviting someone in a different organization silo into your project. It could be recognizing the clique you belong to in your workplace – yes, you do belong to a clique – and including new people in your group.

Inclusion should become the diversity behavior pattern of the next decade. It fosters better communication, creativity, idea generation, and problem solving. It is simple to do and costs nothing. It is an active step that we can all take.

Let me know what you think about this or any other topic I should write about. I’d love to include your ideas.

It used to be that news was something you could get for an hour per day. Thirty minutes for local and thirty for national and international. If you missed it, you could read the paper the following day. So when a tragedy struck somewhere outside of your neighborhood, your intake of that tragedy was limited to an hour of news and usually less. After all, the news programs had to deliver everything that had happened that day in just one hour, and without any scrolling text at the bottom of the screen to feed our hyperactive minds.

That’s the way it was, and much though I hate sounding like a crotchety old man, that’s the way it should be. Not just for watching a tragedy like the one now in Haiti, but for any great sadness, disappointment, or frustration in our lives. Ruminating and playing the same negative tape over and over only serves to reinforce anxiety, anger, and hopelessness.

We should stay informed. We should not ignore the problems in our world. But we should limit our exposure to them. Give yourself a half-hour to get caught up on the news today. If you are frustrated or angry with something in your life and you feel you must experience that anger, allow yourself a few minutes to dwell on it. Then push yourself to move on. If you have a hard time moving on, try completing this sentence 10 times:

I am so incredibly lucky because . . .

BTW, I wrote yesterday about ways to help Haiti including my personal recommendation to text “haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross’s International Response Fund. If you did, you weren’t alone. Turns out the response was historic.

A few months ago I wrote a post about a heroic response after tragedy. Today and in the days to come we will need many heroic responses after what has happened in Haiti. There are many ways to help, but perhaps the easiest is to text “haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross’s International Response Fund.

Please consider donating today. The weeks and months ahead will require a massive effort to first get out of danger and then try to return to some kind of life as usual.

I am both afraid and hopeful for the news that will come out of Haiti today – hopeful for good news in general and for heroic responses to the inevitable bad news.

There will be many people praying for the lives of loved ones in Haiti over the next days or altruistically praying for those we don’t even know. I encourage everyone to join in those prayers.

My hopes go beyond pulling people from the rubble. Maybe this is the moment that enough attention is cast toward this poor country that something shifts other than the tectonic plates.

My wife’s family is Haitian. I have heard for years how gorgeous the land was when they lived there, before they fled under the first President Duvalier.

I don’t know what it will take. But my hope today is that Haiti receives something out of this earthquake that enables it to pull itself up from the tragedy of this moment and also from its tragic history.

So you need to motivate someone. What is the #1 best thing you can do to increase their feelings of commitment and eagerness for their work? The answer may surprise you.

For years I would have said recognition. Public, private, on a boat, with a goat. Just recognize them however you can. Turns out there’s something better.

One of my undergraduate professors, Teresa Amabile, has an article in the Jan/Feb 2010 Harvard Business Review about a study she conducted showing that the #1 best motivator is . . . progress.

Turns out people love to feel their work is moving forward. Road blocks and stagnation frustrate them. Moving the needle excites them.

So remove the hurdles and roll up your sleeves. Apparently, nothing beats progress.

A few weeks ago I was given the opportunity to offer my book, Be the Hero, to one of my own heroes, Seth Godin. A few days ago he wrote a post titled, “The Victim.” I couldn’t help but wonder if it was inspired in part by his reading of Be the Hero. I know the language and sentiment are neither original to my work nor new to his writings. But I wondered.

In either case, he offers a terrific lens through which to determine when you might be falling into victim mentality.

Keep in mind this is a way to determine WHEN not IF you are being a victim. I speak to many people who try to convince me that they really do maintain a heroic mindset. (Though they always know other people who are in dire need of this advice.) The truth is that we all fall into victim mode at times. Seth Godin has simply offered us a useful test to recognize when we are there.

Recently I was asked to guest blog on Sources of Insight. I find the host, JD Meier, to be an interesting guy with valuable thoughts to share.

So what did I write about? How to be heroic of course. Here it is.

Note to the business world: consumers still haven’t learned. Note to consumers: when will you learn? So long as we keep buying stupid stuff, companies will continue to sell it to us. Case in point: Burger King Japan recently introduced a 7 patty Whopper. Just thinking about the normal Whopper gives me heart burn.

CNN listed this Whopper among their Dumbest Business Decisions of 09. But it isn’t the Whopper they criticize, it’s the fact they named it after Microsoft’s Windows 7.

I disagree with CNN. The name may sound stupid to me, but if people are buying them who are we to criticize Burger King. No. My beef (sorry) is with the consumer. When will we have finally had enough of seeking too much?

Of course, until the consumers wise up, businesses should remember – we are still living in the age of bigger, louder, more extreme is better.

Crazy is good. Without crazy we’d have no entrepreneurs. Without crazy we’d have never had any explorers. There would be no inventors.

Of course, sometimes crazy is just crazy.

Happy new year all you polar bears.