values are technology and language Is the code.

Somewhere along the way, we decided values were the soft part of the business. The poster in the break room. The paragraph on the About page. The thing you get to after the numbers work.

Backwards.

Values are the fastest decision-making technology your company owns. They’re why a customer picks you when the competitor is four dollars cheaper. They’re why your best people stay through a bad quarter. They’re the reason a junior employee makes the right call at 11pm without a meeting, a memo, or a manager.

Every decision your company made this week, somebody made in about six seconds using a value they’ve probably never named out loud.

So when your values are aligned, growth compounds. When they’re not, you spend your margin on friction….re-litigating the same decisions, rewriting the same brief, rehiring the same role.

Alignment isn’t the nice-to-have. Alignment is the multiplier.

Okay, here’s the thing. Most companies can’t align on their values because they don’t actually have the vocabulary. We use fourteen different words as if they’re one word. And you cannot align a room around a word that means fourteen things.

Let’s unmask it.

The Fourteen Words We Keep Collapsing Into One

Read that middle column again.

Fourteen different questions. If your leadership team is answering fourteen questions with one word, you don’t have a values problem. You have a vocabulary problem that’s presenting as a values problem.

And here’s the part that stings a little….the words aren’t interchangeable, but they are connected. They stack. One feeds the next. Which means a break anywhere in the stack shows up everywhere else.

The Operational Cascade

Watch one belief travel all the way down through a real company:

BELIEF        Tracking software violates employee trust.
   ↓
VALUE         So we champion autonomy.
   ↓
MORAL         Society already sees micromanagement as a dignity violation.
   ↓
IDEAL         We dream of absolute professional freedom.
   ↓
PRINCIPLE     We never install surveillance software on employee laptops.
   ↓
CREDO         Published, publicly: "We empower builders. We don't watch workers."
   ↓
GOVERNANCE    The board creates an oversight committee on employee data rights.
   ↓
ETHICS        Managers must evaluate output, not logged hours.
   ↓
COMPLIANCE    Review metrics satisfy local labor and fair-evaluation law.
   ↓
STANDARD      Every engineer ships two functional updates a week.
   ↓
NORM          Teams organically stop answering status pings mid-focus.
   ↓
INTEGRITY     An exec secretly tracks a remote team. The CEO fires him that day.
   ↓
CULTURE       High trust. High output. People feel safe and accountable.

That’s not a values statement. That’s a machine.

Notice that nothing in that chain is soft. Governance is a structure. Standards are metrics. Integrity is an event with a cost attached….somebody got fired. Culture is the output, not the input. You don’t install culture. You earn it at the bottom of a cascade you built at the top.

Now notice the failure mode hiding in the same list. Dogma is what a principle becomes when nobody revisits it. Three years later, that same company refuses to adopt security badges because “we don’t track people here.” Same words. Dead logic.

The cascade doesn’t just build. It rots.

Why You Were Never Handed This Vocabulary

Quick history, because this isn’t your fault.

Business ethics wasn’t an afterthought at the birth of the American business school….it was a live, contested field. Gabriel Abend’s history of the period, The Origins of Business Ethics in American Universities, 1902–1936, tracks how seriously the early programs took it. And then how quietly it faded.

Then came 1970. Milton Friedman published “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” in The New York Times Magazine, and the argument stuck. Shareholder primacy became the organizing logic of business education. Two decades where teaching ethics was treated as a distraction from a company’s one real duty: maximize the number.

Enron cracked that open. In April 2003, the AACSB….the global accrediting body for business schools….strengthened its focus on ethics in the accreditation standards. Real progress, with one enormous loophole. It never required a standalone course. More than 150 business professors and ethics officers petitioned for exactly that. They didn’t get it. The standards explicitly left schools “great flexibility” in how to fold ethics in.

So most schools sprinkled it. One day in the marketing syllabus. An afternoon in finance. Diluted into background noise.

And in the modern era it got rebranded entirely. ESG. DEI. Frameworks, scores, dashboards. Look at what happened to the question itself:

OLD ETHICS                      NEW ETHICS
"Is this inherently right?"  →  "What's our metric risk?"

We went from a question a human has to answer, to a number you can delegate to a department.

That’s not a comeback. That’s a costume.

What Breaks When the Cascade Breaks: Predatory Normalization

Here’s the failure I can’t stop seeing.

Norm-ethics decoupling. It happens when a profitable behavior gets adopted so widely that peer pressure converts it into a “best practice”….which completely masks the fact that it violates something fundamental.

The structure is always identical:

[ PRINCIPLE ]     "People have an absolute right to privacy."
       |
[ NORM ]          "Obviously we track every click. Everyone does."
       |
[ THE GAP ]       The credo praises trust.
                  The standard measures extraction.

Nobody in that company thinks of themselves as unethical. That’s the whole trick. The norm arrived pre-approved by the entire industry.

Five of them, and the companies that were born specifically to fight each one.

1. The Financialization of Attention

The move: Interfaces engineered to trick, guilt, or exhaust users. One click to subscribe. A phone call to cancel. Fees that appear on the last screen.

The violation: Autonomy. Treating cognitive bias as an extractable resource.

The antidote: Plausible, open-source privacy-first analytics built as the deliberate alternative to invasive tracking. And the Dark Patterns Tip Line….launched by Consumer Reports with the EFF, Access Now and PEN America, now permanently housed at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab….crowdsourcing deceptive design so researchers and regulators can act on it.

2. The Systematic Elimination of Ownership

The move: Everything becomes a subscription. Software, tractors, heated car seats. Nobody owns anything, and the software blocks independent repair.

The violation: Property rights. You paid for the tool. They kept the key.

The antidote: iFixit, publishing free repair guides and selling the tools that bypass manufacturer lockouts. And the local-first software movement….Obsidian and its peers….keeping your raw data on your own hard drive instead of somebody else’s cloud.

3. Institutionalized Surveillance

The move: Silent, continuous collection of location, financial history, and health searches. Packaged and sold to third parties without clear-eyed consent.

The violation: Privacy. The moral right to a personal boundary.

The antidote: Incogni, DeleteMe, and Optery….businesses that exist purely to hunt down data brokers and legally force a purge. And Proton and HEY, built so that tracking is technically impossible rather than merely promised against.

4. The Intellectual Enclosure Movement

The move: Scraping forums, code repositories, blogs, and artist portfolios without consent, compensation, or attribution, to build closed commercial tools.

The violation: Fair compensation. Systemic appropriation of labor, dressed as advancement.

The antidote: Spawning, whose Have I Been Trained? let creators search the LAION-5B dataset for their own work and opt it out of future training. And Glaze and Nightshade from the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab, which alter image pixels imperceptibly to disrupt unauthorized scrapers. MIT Technology Review called it a guerrilla war. Millions of downloads say the market agreed.

5. Planned Obsolescence and Engineered Waste

The move: Glued-in batteries. Updates that quietly slow a functioning device until you replace it.

The violation: Stewardship. Mountains of e-waste generated to hit a quarterly number.

The antidote: Framework, laptops fully modular down to the ports, swappable with one screwdriver. And Fairphone, doing the same for smartphones with ethically sourced and recycled materials.

The Audit

Look at that list one more time. Every single antidote is a company. A market. Revenue.

Which is the whole point I’ve been circling. Every one of those normalized behaviors created an opening, and somebody walked through it and built a business. Not because it was noble. Because a norm that violates a value leaves customers exposed, and exposed customers will pay to be protected.

So the exercise isn’t “are we good people.” That question goes nowhere and everyone in the room passes.

The exercise is this:

• Name the belief you actually operate on. Not the one on the wall.
• Trace it down. Value, principle, credo, governance, standard.
• Find where the chain snaps.
• Then ask the uncomfortable one: which of our norms would we be embarrassed to publish next to our credo?

That gap is where your growth is currently leaking out. It’s also where your competitor is going to build their antidote company.

Values drive growth. Alignment is what lets them.

Get the words right, and the rest of the cascade has somewhere to go.

#doitconsciously

Sources & Further Reading

• Milton Friedman, “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” — The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970
• Gabriel Abend, “The Origins of Business Ethics in American Universities, 1902–1936” — Business Ethics Quarterly
• AACSB, Ethics Education in Business Schools: Report of the Ethics Education Task Force
• AACSB, Business Accreditation Standards
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Coalition Launches Dark Patterns Tip Line”
• MIT Technology Review, “The AI Lab Waging a Guerrilla War Over Exploitative AI”