Thomas Watson, Jr., the second president of IBM and 16th US ambassador to the Soviet Union:
I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions. Next, I believe that the most important single factor in corporate success is faithful adherence to those beliefs….Beliefs must always come before policies, practices, and goals. The latter must always be altered if they are seen to violate fundmantal beliefs.
Note that: if your policies are inconsistent with your beliefs, you change your policies — not your beliefs. So many companies do the opposite, saying they value people all the while enforcing policies that communicate anything but that.
Of course, the way you know whether a company (or person) really believes something is by what they do.
So what are companies that institute person-depleting policies really saying?