I’ve never been comfortable with the notion of values but I’ve never quite known why. And then someone here at WMW crystallised it for me. ‘Patience,’ she wrote, ‘is a much under rated value.’ And that’s when it struck me. Patience is a virtue. It is an action we choose to take. A value is something we hold inside us. It is private. A virtue, on the other hand, is public: it is what we do. This simple semantic thought has led me to the grandiose conclusion that it is far better for a company to extol virtues because these can be observed and managed. Values can only be inferred and aren’t susceptible to managing.

Abandon all talk of values, o firms of the world. You have nothing to lose but your posters.