[willsewell]

I think what is often missed with values, is the "anti values". Often when I see a list of company values, it looks as if they can have their cake and eat it too. They are not explicit about the trade offs being made; e.g. "more perks (e.g. beer), lower salary". I think if it's hard to find one of these opposing anti-values, then it's not really an interesting choice to make, i.e. at worst it's probably a nice to have.

Last time we discussed our values at work, we thought about what we were trading off and this helped us decide whether they really were important to us.

[Jemaclus]

That's an excellent perspective that I hadn't thought of before. How would you go about doing that? More beer doesn't necessarily correlate to lower salaries -- you might be trading off inclusiveness or safe work environment instead. Or if you have a flat organization that doesn't necessarily mean you have fewer meetings or more autonomy. How do you correlate a value with its anti-value? Or do you just say "We value these things, but we explicitly don't value these things"?