When Value Becomes Valueless

A tick-box triumph

Corporate life can never resist a Big Idea reduced to a small grid. “Value” is today’s specimen under glass. Bosses swear they are “creating value.” Boards insist they are “stewards of value.” Investors want “long-term value.” NGOs and regulators queue up to protect “societal value.” Consultants, smelling day rates, oblige with “value frameworks.”

The Value Research Center (VRC) offers a “Value Model”: seven stakeholder groups, 27 themes, 81 goals promises a way to measure, monitor and manage how firms create and destroy value across people and planet. The seduction is tidy: line up your disclosures in the right boxes and, abracadabra, you look complete.

Tidy, alas, is not the same as true. This is a box-ticker’s paradise: perfectly suited to the paperwork of corporate life and almost perfectly useless. It makes busy executives feel systematic and lets gatekeepers feel assured. What it does not do is what is really needed: tell a credible story of how a business creates and destroys value.

The category error at the heart of “value”

The central flaw is simple. Value is not a fixed object. It is relational, contested and dynamic, different between stakeholder groups, different within them, even different for the same individual from one day or context to the next. Any universal taxonomy, let alone a three-tier grid, will confuse the menu for the meal. A firm can tick “biodiversity” without facing whether biodiversity is existential to its model or a rounding error.

The VRC grid, like most frameworks, is agnostic about priorities. It does not ask which values matter most in the firms economics, how trade-offs are resolved, or how those choices alter resilience. Box-ticking without strategy becomes theatre.

Why it still sells

If this is so, why do such frameworks multiply? Because they serve the politics of corporate life.

• Executives get defensibility: “we followed the framework.”

• Consultants get a product: mapping, scoring, certifying.

• Auditors get something to assure.

• Regulators get comparability: the soothing belief that like is being compared with like.

• Investors get a hygiene screen: a crude filter to weed out egregious laggards.

Everyone looks busy; no one has to talk about trade-offs. The spreadsheet becomes the strategy; the strategy becomes the press release.