Are you looking for your core values?
Introduction
Core values appear to be very important nowadays. The number of hits you will get at Google when typing “core values” comes close to 4 million. When using a meta search machine the number of hits is over a 100 million.
Since the late eighties a fair number of multinationals invited us to measure their culture. Given the complexity of The Hofstede Model it was extremely labour intensive and therefore cost prohibitive to survey a whole multinational. It is only recently that we are able, with the help of the Finnish software company, Feedbackdialog, to do everything on-line, making our approach very cost effective. It is only now possible to conduct very complex assignments.
Thus, these measurements were limited to certain parts of our multinational clients. In some instances our surveys, nevertheless, covered over time a substantial part of them.
All these multinationals were and are cherishing their core values. They often spent a lot of time, energy and money in identifying them and in formulating them in a catching way. Interesting though, we rarely have been able to identify those core values when analysing our survey data. How come?