Many years ago, on a random Thursday at a random company, I received a message asking me to join the CEO and the head of HR in a conference room. Perhaps your first thought is that I was about to get a personal tour of the exit. But it turned out to be much worse than that. They wanted me to help rewrite the company values.
“I have a draft,” the CEO said. “I’ll send it to you, we can discuss it on Monday, and I’m going to present it on Wednesday.”
“Why am I here?” I wanted to ask, because this project — wherein 200 people were about to be told what they should value — seemed either too big for such a quick turnaround or completely pointless.
The trouble, of course, was that asking that question didn’t seem like a reasonable option. So instead I returned to my desk and waited for the document to drop into my inbox, all bold and black, like a bomb. But, despite hitting “refresh” several dozen times, the file never arrived that evening, nor on Friday. It wasn’t until I was strolling the aisles of Publix, at two o’clock on Sunday, that I received it, along with an invitation to meet the next morning.
Believe me when I tell you I sincerely wanted these new values to be flawless, as it was now obvious my role was to provide a rubber-stamp approval, and only a flawless document would allow me to provide that kind of approval in good conscience.