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Values at work

So what are your company’s values? What are your team’s values?

In my podcast the “skill” of learning featured strongly as highly important when recruiting someone. Learning is also a value. In a nutshell values are decision-making criteria: we’ll choose to do something where we’ll learn over something where we won’t learn if it’s a strong value.

So I’m looking at corporate values, wondering about whether Learning as a value is really what’s happening in data science/analytics teams.

Here are some lists of corporate values:

  • Ten most common corporate values. No learning in there.
  • Definition of company values and some examples here. Learning makes it in there.
  • Here’s 190 examples of company values (notice “learn” appears only for Zappos and Build-a-Bear)
  • Learning features in the values / principles for Amazon, Automattic, Hotjar (who wrote the article which lists 10 big company values) and Zappos. Interesting, it doesn’t make it into Google’s values.
  • The word learning occurs 30 times on this page of company core values, mostly as a supporting line when talking about other key values (like innovation, moving fast, ever-evolving). Strangely it does occur as a headline act for Sisense (an analytics company) and for Ellevation, an Education company.
  • KPMG Australia have learning nested under “Excellence”

Learning in any form doesn’t appear under the big picture headings for any of these organisations:

  • McKinsey
  • Deloitte

Of course just because a value is listed doesn’t mean it’s lived. And the opposite is also true: it can not be listed and yet be an underlying tenet for how we recruit. Which is certainly the message that is coming through from my deep dive into the podcast responses around recruiting the best professional analytics capability.

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