Junk Values: Why Corporate Values Fail and What to Do Instead | Erika Clegg

Most corporate values are useless. Not because values don't matter, but because organisations have spent thirty years reaching for the same twenty-four words, integrity, collaboration, respect, excellence, and wondering why nobody believes them.

Erika Clegg is the co-founder of Larkenby, creator of the Active Ethos method and author of Junk Values. She joins Mark Blackwell to explain why generic values actively damage the organisations that adopt them, and what it takes to build values that are, in her words, magnetic: ones that attract the right people and repel the wrong ones.

The conversation covers:

• Why the values problem started in the mid-nineties and has got steadily worse
• The Oxford Character Project finding that over 50% of FTSE 350 companies share the same top value
• How the Active Ethos method works, from diagnostic to embedded culture
• The difference between an essential purpose and an inspiring vision, and why you need both
• Why Cook's "Churchill's Pig" is one of the best corporate values ever created
• Mary Parker Follett's invisible leader, and why her century-old ideas are more relevant than ever

Erika's book Junk Values is shortlisted for the Smart Thinking category of the Business Book Awards 2026 and is available from all good bookstores. Her podcast, Slow Values, is available wherever you listen.

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Transcript

Erika Clegg 0:00

Values should be magnetic, which means they should attract, but they should also repel.

Mark Blackwell 0:06

Welcome to the Arkaro Insights Podcast. This is the show for leaders who want to thrive in a complex adaptive world. Our mission is simple. We're here to help organizations learn and adapt faster than the rate of change in their environment. So we've been following a thread on and off in recent podcasts about purpose. We've had a great podcast with Eric Ries who talked about Mary Parker Follett's century-old concept of the invisible leader, that a deeply embedded shared purpose should guide decentralized organizations. Stephen Wunker, in his AI and the Octopus Organization podcast,

Why Values Must Attract And Repel

Mark Blackwell 0:47

really communicated that an aligned heart is key to decentralized organizations, and so that everyone has a common purpose and can make decisions without the need to go back up to headquarters. And the lovely slant came from Hilary Scarlett and her spaces model for collaboration, which took a neuroscientist view of it and pointed out that purpose is one of the core things that we need so that we don't revert to the two million year old Neanderthal running across the plains away from lions and we stay calm and focused on what we're trying to do. But how do you actually make this purpose work? And how do you make sure that they're not just not those cynical posters that we've seen with whales jumping out of the sea or birds flying and saying relatively meaningless words? Well, we have today Erika Clegg is going to tear down this buzzword Bingo and bring us something useful in terms of creating purpose-driven organizations. Erika is the co-founder of Larkenby, creator of the active ethos model, and author of Junk Values. Erika, welcome to the show.

Erika Clegg 2:01

Hello. Thank you very much for inviting me on. Courtesy of our mutual friend Mary Parker Follett.

Mark Blackwell 2:07

Well, I think we should just remind everyone who Mary Parker Follett is, because that's how we met. I found myself one Sunday morning trawling the internet on the Mary Parker Follett Foundation and saw you giving an excellent presentation, but I thought was inspiring. As a result, I had to invite you onto the show. But not everyone knows who this lady is, because sadly she's been lost in time. So maybe you could share the listeners who she is.

Erika Clegg 2:34

So when I'm talking to people about her, because I always know if I say, Do you know Mary Parker Follett, no one unfortunately will nod, which is not good. This is not a good thing. But then the next question is always, have you heard of Peter Drucker? Oh yes. Yes, because we're interested in leadership. So of course we've heard of Peter Drucker. And I said, okay, well, Peter Drucker credits Mary

Mary Parker Follett And The Invisible Leader

Erika Clegg 2:54

Parker Follett for for essentially for his systems, his processes, his philosophy, everything. And so often things that are attributed to him, which he did in fact say, she also said, she said, first, if I can say that, but she was a woman out of time. She couldn't even graduate from Harvard.

Mark Blackwell 3:13

Eric Ries was saying if she were around now, she would be a viral influencer. But just what is this invisible leader idea that she had?

Erika Clegg 3:22

Well, interestingly, that's not one of her phrases that I tend to reach for. And one of the things I absolutely love about Mary Parker Follett is every one of her fans, the Mary Parker Follitters.

Mark Blackwell 3:33

Yeah.

Erika Clegg 3:33

We've all got a different thing that we get excited by. But I mean the Invisible Leader is she, I mean, she was she was operating in the late Victorian age, and she divided her time between America and the UK because actually I'm really proud of Britain for the fact that she could come and take a degree here and she could graduate, which she couldn't do at that point in America. So she came over here to graduate. And this, of course, was a time where there was a very hierarchical leadership structure. It was just embedded. And it was literal because it was literally people on the mill floor or the factory floor who were sort of, you know, operating the machinery and doing the drudge work, and then people who would have been up, literally raised up from them, who were in charge, pointing fingers, saying, you do that, you go there, you do, you know, that style of leadership. And the closest I think that anyone recently has got to that was at the start of COVID, where suddenly we became these command and control leaders. And actually, I think we all kind of liked it. But most of the time, you can't do that in this day and age. But that was the world in which she was operating. And she had this absolutely extraordinary idea that if people had motivation, that if people felt some sense of the importance of what they were doing and their contribution to it, then they would work better. And that's what this boils down to. I mean, ultimately, it's completely Machiavellian because we're looking at how do you get how do you infuse a workforce sufficiently that it wants to work hard and do well for you? Wow. So it's not about beanbags, it's not about, you know, the hero of the month, it's about none of it, it's about working. But she was amazing. And so sorry, going back to the invisible leader, it's that sense that actually great leaders instill the capability in the people around them to have autonomy to make decisions to make choices. And bringing it back to my practice, the part of the reason why I'm so completely fascinated by this is the the point of values is to help you make good choices, and not just as a leader, but everyone throughout the organization. And if you express them clearly, not in junk terms, then it's easy for people to do that. And if you don't, it's hard.

Mark Blackwell 5:39

It sounds so obvious, doesn't it, really?

Erika Clegg 5:42

Doesn't it? It's just common sense. Like, do you know, like so many amazing things? It's just common sense.

Mark Blackwell 5:47

But what's gone wrong then? I mean, why am I just rolling my eyes at pictures of whales jumping out of water and seagulls flying around and meaningless messages? What's happening?

Erika Clegg 5:59

I know. It's nauseating, isn't it? And in again, part of the reason why I wrote, well, actually the main reason I wrote the book was because this is the gloop in which I'm endeavouring to progress. And of course, when I introduce myself to people at parties by the oh, well, I work in values, you can see their estimation of me plummet. Oh, I thought you seemed quite normal, but I see you're just a BS merchant. So, what do we do about it? You know, because the truth is that it it has been overtaken. In the book, I do a story of sort of the modern history of values, and I start with Mary Parker Follett. And it seems that the problem hit in about the mid-90s, where every organization suddenly went, we need a set of values as part of our vision, our purpose, our values. By the way, all of this stuff is useful. You do need to do it, but you need to do it properly. So we need a set of values.

How Values Turned Into Buzzword Bingo

Erika Clegg 6:46

And then I don't know how it happened, but this vocabulary started up, which was values words. I mean, how we have got so separate from the all this means is what matters to us. But for some reason it needs to have its own language, like French. You know, so uh if you are coming up with your values, you need to make sure you're talking about integrity, collaboration, respect, diversity, excellent, whatever, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We know these words because we see them all the time. They mean nothing out of context. They are not magnetic. Values should be magnetic, which means they should attract, but they should also repel. They should really repel. You don't want the wrong people, you don't want to waste your time. And yeah, so there just became this sort of trite vocabulary that gets trotted out. And what happens is people do half-day workshops, probably doing a man during a management retreat. They write words on post-it notes like integrity because they don't know what else to do because they're getting asked the wrong questions. And then the people go, oh, look, five of us are saying integrity, so that must be one of our corporate values. Let's roll it out. And then the chair launches it. And everyone who has me listening to this claptrap, of course, gets even more cynical if they weren't cynical enough already. So it does the opposite of what it should do. Sorry, I'm ranting. No, it does the opposite of what it should be doing.

Mark Blackwell 7:58

It's passion, that's what we want out of the day.

Erika Clegg 8:01

It's frustration. It's frustration because it should be useful. And and honestly, the way things are going in the modern world with politics and institutions and the behavior of some people who should know better, we really need this stuff. We really need it because we need to be able to trust our judgment. We need to be able to trust the organizations that we work in. And it can be done right, and so often it isn't, and that's a crying shame.

Mark Blackwell 8:30

Well, I mean, just going back to the badness of it, in your book you've got a list of a hundred or so words, but isn't there 24 that dominate?

Erika Clegg 8:39

There are. And that's not my research, that's something called the Oxford Character Project, which happens every four years. The last one was in 2022, and what really interests me about that there's one word. So before COVID, the single most common values word for FTSE 350s and companies in that sort of area was. Well, can you guess what it was?

Mark Blackwell 9:02

No, if I've read your book, I don't know if it's a before or after.

Erika Clegg 9:05

Okay, so it was integrity, of course. Yeah. Now, I mean, I have a view about integrity, but you know, whatever, if it works for you, it works for you. But surely not over 50% of sizable companies. Really? Exactly the same. Anyway, after COVID, it was collaboration. My theory on that is COVID came. Suddenly, all these teams, and we'd been working on the culture, we'd had the beanbags and we were, you know, doing vibing and all of this stuff, they suddenly disappeared out of our offices and workshops and factories and plants, and they went to work on ironing boards in their parental spare bedrooms. And suddenly leaders were going, but what about our culture? Our culture is working. Why what are we going to do? Oh, I know. Collaboration, that'll work. That'll sort the problem. That's what happened.

Mark Blackwell 9:47

Well, it's like integrity for Enron in these ideas. This is what the leaders want to happen in their organization.

Erika Clegg 9:54

They don't want to, because they in that particular example, if they wanted it to happen, they would have behaved with integrity and amusingly, they didn't at all. Exactly. So it's almost like we'll we'll say it and now we can forget about it.

Mark Blackwell 10:05

Correct. And like if we say collaboration like a command, people will, thou shalt collaborate.

Erika Clegg 10:11

Yeah, but they'll just ignore it because they think it's a load of nonsense.

Mark Blackwell 10:15

So one of the ideas that came across very strongly, and it would, you know, it's fundamental to my way of thinking, is that it's the team, the organization, the people that have to communicate it. So uh, you know, that this you cannot force something on on someone, you can only do what people want to do.

Erika Clegg 10:34

Yeah, so the thing I think I always say is, you know, it's not an abdication of leadership. You are not surrendering strategy, direction to everyone apart from the board. Of course not. Why would you do that? But you can't lead people you don't understand. And and the other thing is you don't just look internally, you look externally because your clients have some really important things to tell you, as do your suppliers, as do charities that you're involved with, the media that you're, you know, external organisations. I don't like the word stakeholders, but it sums them up, I guess. They have opinions, they have views, they have experience, and that is vital. Otherwise, you don't know the language, you don't understand what it feels like to, you know, to work with or in your company.

Mark Blackwell 11:17

So, how would a typical engagement with a client of yours look like?

Erika Clegg 11:22

Well, so have you seen the film Nanny McPhee?

Mark Blackwell 11:26

No, sadly not.

Erika Clegg 11:28

Shame. So lots lots of your listeners will have seen the film. Uh, and the story is that Nanny McPhee, played by Emma Thompson in redoubtable form, magically, she's a sort of Mary Poppins character, magically arrives at this household where the dad has been widowered and the children is Victorian, the children have been, you know, have just gone feral. And Nanny McPhee arrives, and they don't want her to be there. The only person who wants her to be there is the father, who really understands the need. But of course, all the feral children are like, What get rid of this damn woman? And then gradually over the course of the film,

Diagnosing The Real Culture Underneath

Erika Clegg 12:04

what happens is her process is evidenced in impact and in actually the joy that people get that they didn't get before, and the way that everyone suddenly comes together and all good stuff, and by the end they're like, Oh, you're great, you're great, at which point she leaves.

Mark Blackwell 12:19

Yeah.

Erika Clegg 12:19

And that and that's basically how a how a project goes. So I will start, uh, there'll always be someone who calls me in who will usually be a new chief executive or maybe the next generation of a family that's taking over. So that kind of sort of uh crux point, it's that transfer of power, you know, the that and they will go, My goodness me, I've lifted the bonnet, I didn't realise help. Because you know it's always true, every organization, when you lift the bonnet, you're always a bit of, oh my goodness me, that was well hidden. And then it's a process of recognising the need. Because so the point with values is you don't start with values. The point with values is you start with recognizing the need, start with recognizing the opportunities, the assets, the the difficult bits, you know, the stuff that you need to get through. Once you've really identified those and really clarified those, really clarified where it's going, what its purpose is, and actually a core philosophy as well is of fundamental importance.

Mark Blackwell 13:12

When someone looks under the bonnet, what might they be seeing?

Erika Clegg 13:16

Well, I mean it's the it's the classics. It's it's lack of alignment between departments or age groups or longevity or locations. It is uh misunderstanding of what feel like the same objectives, which actually brings you back to those words, because if you say honesty to someone, that means different things. It shouldn't, but it it does. What else will there be? Just just different in terms of attitudes and approaches and wishes and motivations that have not been recognised. And there will always be problems. There will always be problems, uh, and you need to identify them. I have rules which is no elephants in the room and no ostriches with their heads in the sand, because if anyone is denying or not speaking about something, we simply can't progress. So we go to some quite uncomfortable places, which is fine. That's my job. And then the point of the values, you might think of them as behavioural principles, how we do things around here. They're the things that help you make the choices. When people have been brought together by the vision and the purpose, those choices will give everyone the autonomy to be able to move towards them and the unity to move towards them.

Mark Blackwell 14:25

So I had Juan Aguinario of um Kerry Group, and he was the chief sustainability officer at the time, but they went round and really tried to listen to all the employees around the organization. So it was almost, you know, they were getting the feedback in, crowdsourcing as it were, to come up with something that I thought was pretty inspiring for a food ingredients company. Inspiring food, nourishing life. Which is a lovely juxtaposition which causes you to link about link it think it through. What do you actually do to start getting the ideas coming up once you've looked under the hood?

Erika Clegg 15:02

Yeah, so the the looking under the hood is a diagnostic. The so I I don't have people in a room together. I ideally I will speak to people individually because I don't want groupthink, and I don't ask them what do you think our values are? And there's a few reasons for that. But really, number one reason is people kind of panic, they get a bit rabbit in headlights. Uh because I'm great one for my animal metaphors, by the way. Apologies. That's good. Because they go, I don't quite know what that means, I don't quite know what it expects of me, what impact is it gonna have on me? What actually are values anyway? So you you just get them on the back foot, and that's not fair, and you're not gonna get good stuff out of people. So the questions instead are what's it like working here? Can you think of something where like a time where things went really well? Who were you

Finding Themes Through Stories Not Workshops

Erika Clegg 15:49

with? What what happened? What did it feel like? Do you still talk about it? Was it celebrated? And you bring all of this stuff together. Now, of course, you'll get the complaints as well, and that's really useful. But what we're looking at is us at our best. And you do exactly the same, as I say, with clients, with suppliers, with whatever, you know, what's it like working with them? What and you distill all this stuff, and I call it filling the snow globe, because you know that thing with those little plastic snow globes that you shake them up and it's just overwhelm.

Mark Blackwell 16:16

Yeah.

Erika Clegg 16:17

And when I'm working on this, because I do this myself, you know, I haven't got a great big team of people, it's me going into organisations doing this. So I do get to overwhelm. I mean, I will have a few sleepless nights because my brain is full of all these stories. But what you start to see is eventually that the snow settles and you'll see key themes. Now bear in mind the goal here is to have uh a set of principles that will help the organization progress towards the strategy, delivery of the strategy. We're not creating a new organization, we're not overwriting the strategy. We want to get to the strategy. But what starts to happen is you see themes, but you also see mood, you see personality, you see motivations, you see vernacular by which I mean what slang do people use? What are the words that people use? Because what really brings this to life is I find often that the specific phrases that I am recommending have actually been said to me in one of those conversations. So there's one lovely one which I always liked to, I always look back on. I was working with a logistics company, and one of their team was based in a supermarket of depot, you know, for where all of these trucks were going out from. He was a long way away from home, he was a long way away from head office, and his girlfriend had just had a baby. Now, I'd been having conversations which were going really well, and one of the themes that kept coming up was family, and I was thinking, this conversation is gonna blow that out of the water. I'm really dreading it because it seems like such a good theme, but if I have one where it goes it doesn't work, then it ain't gonna work. Anyway, what this guy said is he said, Oh, I love working for company name, because wherever you are, you're part of the family. He just said that. Well, obviously that became one of their values. Wherever you are, you're part of the family. And there's too many organizations just use that sort of family thing as a as a shorthand, and often it's nonsense. But I spoke to the guy who was at the furthest possible outpost on his own, struggling, and he still felt it. My goodness me, that was true.

Mark Blackwell 18:18

So that's the authenticity, that's the slow food.

Erika Clegg 18:20

It's true, yeah, exactly. But you've got to be patient. I'm not a patient person, I'm I'm deeply impatient. The only way you can do this is with patience because it's about longevity. You know, this is about long-term thriving. This is nothing, none of this is ever short-term. And unfortunately, we live in a world where everything's getting faster pay. I mean, look at the way we've got this revolving doors of prime ministers in the UK, you know, it's just bah. This is about trust, which comes up again and again and again. It is about the good use of power, and it's about sustainable practice, longevity, you know, having being able to deliver things with a big long vision, not just short-term quarterly, annual, you know, financial.

Patience Trust And Long Term Practice

Mark Blackwell 19:09

Yeah. No, indeed, it's it's fascinating because we think we just need to go back to the title of your book, just in case listeners has missed it, you know. It is the Inspire Integrity Collaborate, the 24 buzzwords, which is the equivalent of McDonald's Big Max and Burger King Whoppers. It's no easy to digest. Tastes good for a few moments, but then it's a nasty taste in the mouth.

Erika Clegg 19:34

I mean, it was quite funny. When this came out, Gordon Ramsay, who has over the years, I mean, not as much as Jamie Oliver, but he has, been a bit on the bandwagon about food production. Literally, when this came out, he was advertising some Burger King burger. Um it was fascinating because online people were going, he sold his soul to the devil, you know. People are so judgmental and quite rightly so, you know, he'd do anything for a bit of money. Reputationally, this is again about long-termism, because something might look really good now, and maybe it's going to be worth a couple of million if you're Gordon Ramsay working for Burger King. But what does it do for your future earning potential? You know, let's bring it back. That none of this, by the way, is just about being nice. None of this is just about uh, you know, being good people, although one, you know, one would hope that most people are. This is actually about good business practice. But you've got to think long term.

Mark Blackwell 20:27

No, absolutely. I mean, in DuPont they had four core values. And obviously the first one started with safety, respect for the people, environment, and so forth. Every single meeting in DuPont started with a three-minute core value.

Erika Clegg 20:41

Yeah.

Mark Blackwell 20:42

Which just brought you back. It did a number of things. It reminded you of the importance of core values, it reminded you when you had difficult situations. That was the principles by which you made your decisions. And it also brought a lovely grounding to each session because people came from rushing in, unpacking their laptops, to just slowly being a little bit more centered and aware of each other to have a much more productive meeting. So I'm a hundred percent sold on the values. I'm just frustrated that they've we've rightly become so cynical because they become useless and worthless with their when they're pulled out of the buzzword bingo from the 24-word list.

Erika Clegg 21:22

Exactly. And and the problem does it always come back, comes back to why do we need these things? What are these things here to do? And if you don't keep pulling yourself back to that and you just come up with a list that sounds good, they're no use. Of course they're no use. You're not being critical. You've got to be critical, you've got to be tough.

Mark Blackwell 21:42

So we've got the values. We've used a lot of words, and you know, we use things like purpose, mission, vision, and values and and beliefs as well. Can you just guide us through your active ethos methodology to think what comes when and why on all of these things? Thank you.

Erika Clegg 22:00

So starting on the values, uh, the way I refer to values is in this context is stretch values. And the reason I say stretch values is because what we are putting in place is the mechanism by which people can make choices that help them to be their best. Lovely. But of course, most people come to work just to do a day's work, you know, that we want to achieve things in that time, but at the end of it we want to go home, you know, and and that's it. So if we're suddenly strutting around the place going,

Active Ethos Vision Purpose Then Values

Erika Clegg 22:29

stretch values so that you can be your best every day, you're gonna get quite a lot of what so what?

Mark Blackwell 22:37

Yeah.

Erika Clegg 22:37

So you need to contextualise it because those do not live on their own. They're part of an ecosystem, and that is active ethos, as you say. So the two things that are the reason are these two things. One is the vision, and the other one is the purpose. Now, when I talk about vision, I'm talking about something that really inspires people. So uh a reference point I have is Winnie the Pooh. Another animal. Because there's a story I share, which is that Winnie the Pooh was walking in the Hundred Acre Wood with his friends, and there was honey in a tree. And Winnie the Pooh absolutely loves honey. Now, Winnie the Pooh's personality is he's affable, but he's quite lazy. So he's very nice, but he wouldn't be a good member of staff. Let's be realistic. But he sees the honey and he can smell the honey, and he can't quite reach the honey. He tries to climb the tree, he gets a blue balloon, he pokes himself grey to look like a flag, floats up uh to look like a cloud, floats up in the air, gets stung by bees. In other words, Winnie the Pooh is making a massive effort. And why is he making a massive effort?

Mark Blackwell 23:38

Because he wants the honey.

Erika Clegg 23:40

Exactly. So the thing I also, and this is one of those lovely things where you see people going and they start writing it down. Don't talk about your strategy in terms of your strategy board, which will be pounds, dollars, yens, percentages, headcounts, skews, locations, whatever. Numbers. Lovely numbers, lovely, ooh, nice numbers. Because your numbers do not excite your people. To articulate a genuinely inspiring vision, you need to know what your people's honey is. We're back to those conversations. Now let's talk about purpose. I talk about two types of purpose, and the reference points I use for these are a hammer and Maya Angelou. So you need to have an essential purpose. Now, for a certain type of organization, your purpose will be like a hammer. So what's the purpose of a hammer?

Mark Blackwell 24:23

By hit a nail.

Erika Clegg 24:24

It's to hit things, exactly. Now, you could go to Louis Vuitton, who just this year have released household tools. Yeah. Honestly, and they haven't, but they should. And you can spend probably £15,000 on the most beautiful hammer, and it has a leather handle with that wonderful monogram and it is made of the most beautiful metals, and it is a thing of absolute joy. Or you can go round to your local hardware shop on your high street and spend £1.29. What will they both do? Hit a nail. Exactly. So the purpose of a hammer is to hit things. Now, if you've got a very practical group of people, that's the kind of purpose they're going to like, you know, blunt, to the point, this is what we're here to do, no messing about. Myra Angelou, I talk about because she has a there's a quote from her which is my purpose in life in life is not to survive but to thrive and to do so with some passion and some compassion, etc. etc. So she has this wonderful quotation about basically living a wonderful, rich, fulfilling life. Now, if you've got a certain type of team, they will want their purpose to elevate the heart, to give them an emotional reward. So you know your team. You will go hammer or Meyer Angelou version. Is it practical or is it emotional? You get your purpose right and you get your vision right. And actually, people are going, we want to achieve that. We want to deliver on that purpose, we want to achieve that vision. They're not thinking about values. What they're going is, how are we going to do it? And by the way, you need cognitive diversity in your organization. Otherwise, you end up just doing all the same old things all the time. With cognitive diversity comes all sorts of other diversity that can be tricky to manage. If people are focused together on something they really want to achieve, that really brings people together because that becomes their shared focus rather than their differences. They look on what unites them, which is this sense of common purpose. Now you see the point of stretch values, because what stretch values do is they help people to make choices that will allow them to progress in such a way that they can deliver on those two things, this inspiring vision and this essential purpose. You really build all the actions in place around that through the team. So you have a team of people from across the organization, it's not top-down, and it's repetitive action. Plant a thousand seeds, 850 flowers, bloom, you know, you keep going, you keep going. Essentially, that's a flywheel because what you end up doing is you have this sort of, and I did it first in my own business, so I know this works. You have this sort of process where it becomes intuitive, it becomes embedded in the organization, but you have to do a lot of heavy lifting first.

Mark Blackwell 26:59

I mean, we can get cynical about these blasted whales jumping out of the water, but true purpose statements are so memorable. Cast yourself back to the 90s when Microsoft said that they wanted a computer on every desk. At that time, there that was a major effort to do, and I'm sure leverage that organization. Now obviously it's trivial. But uh, and for some of our listeners might be wondering, but there was a world when there was only about four computers in the world. You know, to come out with that that purpose statement of having one on every desk is and then Steve Jobs in his think different. And that that just tells people how to behave. I th I think some of these, some of them, one done well, they're wonderful.

Erika Clegg 27:38

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean it it's it is not it's not by accident that I started life in brand communications and strategic

Memorable Values That People Live

Erika Clegg 27:46

communications. You know, this is a communications exercise, but by that I mean starting off with an incredibly deep level understanding of an organization. None of this is sugarcoating. It's based on good understanding, and bear in mind, communications is a two-way thing. Communications is not blair, communications is this first.

Mark Blackwell 28:07

Yeah. Now I think people really do appreciate this conversation to have some examples from you, and if there's one more that I can wean out from you, and that was the example that you gave of the London company Cook.

Erika Clegg 28:20

Yes.

Mark Blackwell 28:21

How did that come about? Because I thought that was beautiful. How about it?

Erika Clegg 28:25

Churchill's Pig. So that's not something I worked on, but it's a beautiful story, which, and actually often when I'm when I'm illustrating a slow value, I will use Cook's Churchill's Pig. So Cook is a fabulous frozen food business doing really, really well. I understand it grew by 10% last year, its profits, that is, despite the fact its raw materials are going up, its energy costs are going up, its staff costs are going up, all of these things, it's a really high performer commercially. Their values are really cool, and one of them is Churchill's pig. Now, Winston Churchill apparently said that um dog looks up at man, cat looks down on man, but a pig looks man straight in the eye and sees it's equal, and his favourite animal for this reason was a pig. Now, you could say respect, you could say equality, you you know, there are lots of words you could use that say the same thing. But why not say Churchill's pig? Who's going to forget that? You know, this, and also it it works for Cook, because Cook, if you think, if you if you know the brand, they're very British, they're quite intelligent, it's good quality, it's a sort of slightly, it's got a slightly scruffy look to it in a nice way. It's got all of those things attached to that word. But then what they do is, of course, they then have to bring it to life. It's not enough just to say these things, it's fundamentally important that you ignite them as well. So they have something called Churchill's Pig Week, where it is a week every year where anyone across the organization can share their ideas for improvements, for innovations, whatever. There is all year round an email address, which is Churchill's Pig at, etc., etc., which allows those conversations to be happening all year round as well. But sometimes we have to be very, very clear and go, this is the week where this happens. You know, it's not enough to have an open door policy. You have to stand outside and say, do come in, please come in, please come in and join in. The uh founders of the business, Ed and Rosie, who are brother and sister, they don't have offices. They hot desk, everyone hot desks, they hot desk. Trustpilot, they have something like 90,000 reviews on Trustpilot. They reply to, they they they aim to reply to all of them within 24 hours. They hit that around 95% of the time. That says respect to me. That says Churchill's pig. So it's an absolutely brilliant example of a fun, clear, memorable value that people will use because it's fun and it's funny, but it's really, really brought to life. It's very, really powerful.

Mark Blackwell 30:56

That's it. Brilliant. Thank you very much, Erika. So tell me more about where can people buy your book, find out more, and tell me more about your podcast as well.

Erika Clegg 31:06

Thank you. Yeah, it's low values. The book is available from all good bookstores across the world, which is lovely. It's currently shortlisted for the smart thinking category of the Business Book Awards 2026, which came as a nice surprise.

Mark Blackwell 31:22

Congratulations.

Erika Clegg 31:23

And vindicate thank you, and a sort of vindication of my approach, uh, which is quirky, I would say to say the least. I have a podcast called Slow Values because when I find someone who I can see is very personally values-driven or is part of an organization that is really growing from this stuff, I want to spend time with

Where To Find The Book And Podcast

Erika Clegg 31:43

them. I want to ask them good questions. So, and it's again, it's it's slow. You know, these episodes are 45 minutes to an hour long, they're conversation, but it's a it's an entertaining listen. They're not sort of snappy in out bombard questions, they're conversations. So it's quite fun. And in terms of the work I do, I mean, I I build my work around the story. So if you're coming into an organization and you need to tell its story, and that story has to be clear and honest and have values and vision threaded into it, stitched into it, and it brings in your heritage and it looks at your future. That's what I do. But if those components are all built into it, without the story, they're they sit separately with the story. They really come to life for people. And it's one of those contextual things, it doesn't work without it.

Mark Blackwell 32:31

Thank you so much, Erika. That's brilliant. Thank you for a wonderful half hour session. It's been uh inspiring. I hope it inspires other people to go out and look and think about what their values and their purpose and their mission is and come up to something that's going to make life a little bit more worthwhile living as a result.

Erika Clegg 32:48

Nice. That's a love, it's a lovely angle on it.

Mark Blackwell 32:50

Thank you so much, Erika. Goodbye.

Erika Clegg 32:52

Thank you. Thank you.