Guidewire

I met some nice and very smart people.

Mottos like: integrity, rationality, collegiality.

Guidewire has this motto: integrity, rationality, collegiality. I'm sure that the people who originally composed this motto had good intentions. But, over time, these three words have become a tool to control employees. If management feels someone is behaving in some undesirable way, disagreeing, say, with some engineering decision or company policy, s/he is told s/he is being "irrational" or "uncollegial."

It's like the French Revolution, whose motto was: Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Noble sounding words, true, but if individuals were not behaving as the Committee of Public Safety wanted them to, the Committee found them guilty of not conforming to the principles of the motto and dispatched them to the guillotine. So, ironically, France ended up with oppression instead of liberty.

So my advice to management is: drop the pompous motto. It reeks of thought control.