Jer's Thesis — Core Values Notes

Maintaining Organizational Core Values During Growth — Jeremy Janzen, Masters of Leadership, Royal Roads University, Nov 2008. Action research conducted inside HyLife/Hytek itself as it scaled from two family farms to Canada's largest privately-owned hog producer (~580 employees): a 79-response employee survey, management and non-management focus groups, and a World Café synthesis. Full text: core-values-thesis.md / Core Values Thesis.doc in this folder.

The key ideas

1. Growth doesn't kill values — exclusion does. Employees understood the values nearly perfectly (4.3–4.7/5) but lived them at lower rates (3.3–4.2). Clarity was never the constraint; communication breakdown and fractured unity were. The fix is structural inclusion, not values workshops.
2. The perception gap is the diagnostic. A 19-point gap between management's and non-management's view of whether leadership lived the values. The gap itself is the data — it shows where inclusion has broken before anything visibly fails.
3. Core values must be shared, unique, enduring, and manifested. Hytek's values stuck because they came from the people's own language ("Get 'er done," "Work hard, play hard") — discovered, not consultant-installed.
4. Values leak through four manifestations: strategy/growth decisions, communication processes, reward systems, people practices. At Hytek, communication was weakest — so all 13 co-created recommendations targeted structure (newsletter reform, founder site visits, "Hytek 101" orientation, work exchanges), not value statements.
5. The method is the message. Announcing "empowerment" by top-down memo violates the value being promoted. The action-research design — employees as co-researchers and co-designers — was the change mechanism.
6. The 11th value. The focus groups discovered the missing value themselves — Teamwork — and senior leadership approved it without debate. (A story worth telling: sometimes values emerge through the work, not before it.)

What it gives the business (2026)

• The B2B audit instrument, already proven. The four-manifestations grid + perception-gap survey + What's-Working/Improve/New focus-group method is a tested organizational values audit, run at a real 580-person company. It's the named instrument for engagement 1 of the B2B wedge (HR audit → cohort → 1:1 coaching) — see the Strategy Brief.
• Credibility language no competitor can fake: "In my own study, employees understood the values at 4.5/5 but lived them at 3.5 — it's never clarity; it's inclusion, modeling, and manifestation."
• The values-translation lens for multicultural rooms (Hytek's immigrant workforce then; cohorts spanning India, Bangladesh, Tibet, Myanmar now).
• The 13 recommendations as a client menu — most low-cost, all co-created, each tagged with the value it protects.

2008-Jer vs. 2026-Jer (the contrast)

Continuous: inclusion as the architecture, leaders model first, values lived-not-stated, trust and communication as foundation. The action-research instinct became the pack — the cohort is a micro action-research project.

Absent in 2008, central now: the soul. No crock-pot, no brokenness, no formation language, no faith register — the words "wild dogs" and "pack" never appear. The thesis is institutional and careful (the boss's son proving rigor). 2008-Jer studied how organizations keep values; 2026-Jer forms people — values became a subset of "who do you become?" The "freedom" theme that closes the current Magnetism lesson exists in 2008 only as an undeveloped footnote.