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HM Harry Max Harry Max Executive coach, consultant and product design and development leader, and managing partner at Peak Priorities.

“When a company or an organization puts its values down in writing, they're often just platitudes, and they're often not stated in a way that makes them actionable. They're barely understandable, because often they're just some word like integrity or humility or transparency, but they're not stated in a way that says, 'This is more important than that. Do this even over that.'”

Traction Heroes · User Experience · November 2026

“When a company or an organization puts its values down in writing, they're often just platitudes, and they're often not stated in a way that makes them actionable. They're barely understandable, because often they're just some word like integrity or humility or transparency, but they're not stated in a way that says, 'This is more important than that. Do this even over that.'” — Harry Max, Traction Heroes

Context

Jorge Arango had said mission and vision statements matter for aligning leaders but nobody else cares about them. Harry Max agrees, and says values statements fail because they never rank one thing above another.

Transcript

Traction Heroes Around 15:15 into the episode
Harry Max

Угу.

Jorge Arango

And it’s not uncommon for vision and mission, these two, these two seeming, uh, counterparts

Harry Max

Ja. c particularly when leadership is looking to nail the ubiquitous About Us page in the site, right? Like, which is… It’s interesting because website, designing websites for organizations ostensibly is about creating a destination online that their customers and partners and so on can visit to learn about them, and that’s actually, that’s obviously the outcome of that exercise. But those artifacts are at-- They’re downstream from a series of conversations that require introspection and require talking about what the business is and how it wants to show up in the world. Uh, and if it’s undergoing a redesign, it’s because conditions have changed in some way, right? Something has happened that has motivated them to go through that. So it’s like th-there’s a little bit of like soul-searching happening. So I’ve been part of conversations like that. I don’t-- We, we don’t have to get into, into details about it, but I will say that I’ve always been apprehensive about sharing the statements, the vision and mission statements, as is, on things like About Us pages, because I think that those are-- those articulations are very important. To your point, it’s very…

Jorge Arango

When I think of mind maps The value of a mind map for me, and I suspect this is true for other people as well, is that it allows you to see the big picture. You can map out all the components of it. And in the example that you started calling out, I think that this was in the reading, uh, it…

Harry Max

Yeah.

Jorge Arango

B- uh, yeah, I don’t remember exactly what it was either, but without getting into the whole, you know, is it a mission or is it, is it a vision, the picture that you’re drawing when you’re making one of these mind maps, is it somehow inclusive of the world outside of the organization? Or is it…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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