A few weeks ago I conducted an exercise with a few students, and with Ivan. I emailed everyone a list of 130 different ‘values’ – literally, abstract ideas that some people value more than others in their lives. Here are a few examples from the list: Equality, Justice, Kindness, Security, Self-respect, Humour, Patience, Vision, Hope … it’s really quite a long list.

The thing about values is not that people value them. The point is that different people value them differently. For some people, doing justice and seeing justice done are much more important than, say, generating hope – and for others, it’s the other way around. Others feel equality trumps both justice and hope as ‘values’ in their lives.

It’s not just individuals who have values, either. Businesses also have values, which reveal themselves in their products and services, the way the business operates, the way it interacts with people, and they way it responds to challenges.

Let’s take a well-known example: Apple, Inc, one of the world’s most famous companies. For anyone who’s familiar with Apple products it doesn’t take long to identify Apple values as things like design aesthetic, seamless integration, “it just works” and build quality. Nobody who knows Apple would say their values are value for money, open engineering, repairability or sympathetic customer relations.

Why is this important, and why is it helpful? Every business wants and needs to generate customer satisfaction. Without happy customers no business will succeed. When the values of a business are aligned with the values of its customers the customers will be pleased, and the business with do well. When the values of the business don’t align with the values of its customers those customers tend to be dissatisfied.

To continue with Apple as an example: if you prioritize value for money over design aesthetic, you’re liable to think Apple products are overpriced. If you value technical openness over “it just works” you’ll be frustrated at how difficult it is to adapt and modify Apple products under the hood. And if you value repairability then you’re going to be unhappy that Apple products are difficult and expensive to fix when they go wrong. But if you delight in cool design, are happy to pay extra for it, and don’t mind doing things “the Apple way” – then you’re likely to be very pleased with Apple products.

One of the ways Apple manages to succeed is to telegraph to potential customers what its values are, and then live up to them. That way customers who are aligned with the business will know it, and equally importantly potential customers whose values are misaligned will know to take themselves somewhere that suits them better.

To take another example: the European airline Ryanair offers very low cost air fares but everyone knows that their customer service is very difficult to contact. Happy Ryanair customers are ones who value low prices over great service. Travellers who want great customer service know to book with a full-service airline instead. Both kinds of customer can book with an airline whose values match their own, and therefore have the best opportunity to be satisfied.

For this to work what’s really important is that the values a company claims for itself are the ones it actually embodies in real life. There’s no point claiming to be the “value” option in your market, if your prices are 30% higher than everyone else’s. Customers who do want economy will find out that you mislead them and will be unhappy about it. There’s no point in a business claiming that awesome customer service is a priority, if, when it comes to it, the customer service is frankly awful.

A frequent defect of small businesses is to claim to uphold all possible values: if an organization says it’s both value-driven but also premium-focused, that it prioritizes honest feedback but also boasts of its kindness and caring, mixed in with fostering both cooperation and individuality as well as a healthy does of creativity and self-discipline but also risk-taking too, it’s pretty clear it doesn’t really know what its real values are. I guess the temptation for doing so is to try to appeal to absolutely everyone and therefore avoid alienating any potential customers. But customers are smart people, and work out what the real values of the business are pretty quickly. Those who are aligned with what those values turn out to be are happy – and those who aren’t, are apt to feel misled and out of place, which is bad for both those customers and for that business.

My own goal here is to find students whose values are closely aligned with mine, and the ones that this flight school embodies. Those are the students who are going to thrive. I have a pretty good idea of what values I think are important; but I also wanted to know if Ivan and I are being consistent in the way we embody those values and the way we interact with students. So what I asked of some of my students (and of Ivan too) was to pick five out of those 130 different values that they felt applied to Alec Myers Flight Training as a business.

I was actually really pleased with the results, which allowing for some variation in language, showed a lot of consistency. Here are the results, grouped together in ways that make sense to me. This is honest feeback about the values we embody, and when these are things that are important to a potential new student too that person has the best foundation for success with us:

• accountability, respect, self-discipline, integrity, authenticity, transparency
• wisdom, knowledge, understanding, learning
• efficiency (three mentions)
• excellence (also three mentions)
• growth, confidence, adventure, curiosity and uniqueness

This is not to claim that we are perfect (or even good) at these ideals. How well we live up to them is another matter. But would be accurate to say these are the things at which we try very hard to be good.