Joy at Work. Dennis W. Bakke
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that the corporate values at AES arose out of the personal values of the co-founders. The transformation of personal values to organizational values is accomplished with the word “shared.” Shared implies that members of an organization agree on the definition and importance of a value. Sharing values, especially in a secular company, can run afoul of the popular view in our society that people should decide for themselves how values are to be interpreted. If individuals, whether they are vice presidents or board members, interpret values individually, the values are not shared.
We attempted to mitigate this problem through an extensive written and oral orientation for prospective employees before they joined AES. We discussed and defined our values so people could decide whether they wanted to be a part of the AES community. Discussions of our values continued at monthly and quarterly business review meetings. The company’s insistence on articulating its values in all types of settings mystified outsiders. A banker who worked with us expressed amazement at his visit to AES headquarters. “I went by an office and two VPs were arguing about whether something was fair or not. Can you believe that?”
At AES, revising the interpretation of a shared value required a leader who spoke for the entire organization to listen to the reasons for the proposed change, get advice from colleagues, and then decide if a change was appropriate.
I suspect that in most companies, especially ones that put a premium on individual freedom and diverse views, values are not really shared by the majority of the employees. The values either are adjusted frequently to suit changing situations, or they are defined so ambiguously that everyone can agree with them. As a result, they have very little effect on the behavior of the organization or the individuals who work there. They become especially irrelevant in times of trouble.
“Hey, Dennis, our organization has values too,” was a comment I sometimes heard from people outside our company. It was a helpful reminder that we were sometimes perceived as arrogant or even sanctimonious. Every person and every organization have values. But in this age of “tolerance,” it is politically incorrect to say that any of these values is more appropriate than others. The truth, however, is that some values are better than others. Truthfulness and selflessness, for example, are preferable to deception and selfishness.
Several articles I have read recently suggest that it doesn’t matter what purpose or set of principles you follow as long as you establish some set of standards for everyone to get behind. A friend of mine from California put this “all values are equal” philosophy in perspective when he recalled a conversation he had with a person he met on the beach. It concluded with, “Hey, that’s great. You’re into Jesus and I’m into surfing.” After hearing that story, I began to use the word “principles” along with the word “values” to describe the key concepts that guide organizational life. Principles connote less ethical relativism than values and more of the unchanging truths by which I believe we should live. The question is not whether we have values, but which values and principles really guide our behavior.
Since the early 1980s, many corporations have adopted values statements. Companies hang them on office and factory walls, post them on their Websites, and include them in their annual reports. The proliferation of values statements prompted one journalist to call them “a deodorant for self-interest.” There is often basis for cynicism. The values articulated by many companies have only a minimal effect on how they conduct their businesses. CEOs rarely talk about them at investor meetings. Try to think of a company that makes ethics one of its most important criteria for evaluating individual performance, calculating raises and bonuses, or awarding stock options. How often do principles drive the financial investments and operating strategy of a company? Paying lip service to values may be good public relations, but it is a hollow and cynical exercise. Values and principles mean something only when they affect everything we do, every day of the week.
My strong belief in shared values and principles does not mean that either AES or I consistently met the standards we set for ourselves. They were our aspirations, and they were deeply felt, but we were fallible like anyone else. At the same time, I resisted all efforts to lower our standards or to ease the burden of accountability that we imposed on ourselves. It was better to try our best, I felt, and be willing to come clean when we fell short of our goals.
In the early 1980s there was a small start-up company that shared office space with AES in Arlington, Virginia. The founders had designed clip-on neckwear for women to wear as an accessory to their outfits. After several false starts, the company leaders attended an industry trade show to see if they could market their bows. Somewhat to their surprise, they got orders for several thousand. When the president got back from the trade show, he came running into my office to tell me the good news. Then he paused and asked, “Dennis, how are we going to make all them bows?”
A year or so later, we were in much the same position at AES. Our power plant in Houston was under construction, and we were beginning to think about how to operate the plant. Most of us in the company had hardly seen the inside of a power plant, let alone worked in one. Board members who had significant industrial operating experience said, “You don’t know anything about operating a power plant. Get somebody who does.”
I followed their advice. Several advisers also suggested that we would need a whole different approach with our employees in the power plant than we had with the M.B.A.’s, engineers, and other college graduates who filled the home office at the time. “These people are different,” one board member said. “They want to be paid weekly, preferably in cash. They don’t care about your soft-headed stuff like values. Fun will be a totally foreign concept that is just not applicable to industrial operations.”
“These people are different” was the statement that troubled me the most. I remembered hearing the same kind of language used to belittle African-Americans in the ’60s. It turned out to be dead wrong. Would it be true of people hired to work at our new cogeneration facility in Houston? I wasn’t sure, and it took me over two years to confirm my original misgivings.
Once I did, I set in motion a revolution in that plant that dramatically changed the AES workplace and the way we operated our facilities. The shared values of the home office eventually would be used to guide every aspect of life at the plants—from hiring and compensation to organization and decision making. It was the beginning of an audacious effort to create the most fun workplace ever.
At another strategy conference in the late 1980s, an AES vice president asked the 30 people in attendance to close their eyes and make a “movie” of their lives. A number of people then shared the outlines of their movies with the group. The plots differed widely, of course, but the same theme cropped up again and again. In almost all the movies, people used their talents and skills to make a positive contribution in the world. Although it was hardly a scientific sampling of working Americans, the consistency of their goals was striking. We used the result of this exercise to start the process of defining the purpose of our company. If the goal of our individual lives was to make a positive difference in the world, shouldn’t we try to do the same thing as a corporation? During that conference we wrote the first draft of our company’s purpose—to meet the electricity needs of people and organizations. Over time this statement of purpose would be refined and become an important part of the shared values and principles of the company.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, my wife, Eileen, and I met weekly with five or six other couples for Bible study, prayer, and a discussion of our joys and problems. One of the key areas of learning from my time with this group was a deeper understanding of “stewardship”—the idea that we have a larger purpose than simply satisfying our own needs. I came to realize that what I had learned as a 5-year-old was incomplete at best. Stewardship was more than giving money to the church or contributing to other good causes. I learned that it was more about what I did with the money I kept and spent than the money I gave away. It was more about how I lived my daily life. It was about how I used my abilities and skills to make a positive contribution to society and to serve others.
About this time, I read a book by Peter Block (an author unknown to me at the time) entitled Stewardship-Choosing Service Over Self-Interest. It had an enormous influence on me. It showed me how my biblical understanding of stewardship could be applied to a major business. Stewardship