Values

Values. This word is much used by businesses to declare their core qualities: honesty, integrity, loyalty, flexibility and fairness are among the most popular. The services offered by a business may indeed be valued by its customers, but surely “values” are held by people, by individuals within organisations, not the organisations themselves? And should we not be able to assume without needing to be told that those qualities are in any case firmly embedded in the people who work in the business?

Understandably these are the sort of qualities that businesses like to advertise as underpinning their activities; the close association of “values” with “worth” encourages those scrolling down through a company’s website to associate it with commercial as well as moral superiority. 

So here is something to reflect on. The conjectural PIE (Primitive Indo-European) origin of “values” is *wal, which means simply “to be strong”. It has no moral undertone, it does not mean to be “good” or any of the other moral and practical virtues now associated with the modern use of “values”. Might now be a good time for businesses to re-think “values” and make a simpler and more powerful connection with us by parading the qualities of honesty, integrity, loyalty etc as their “strengths” instead?