There's been a lot written about the firing of former HP CEO Mark Hurd.  If you're not familiar with the story or need a brush up, go here and read up.  Anyone who's had to deal with nasty employee relations situations understands there's probably more to this situation than has been openly reported.

So, before you clobber me with emails, just know I get that.  There's probably a lot we don't know.  But, let's assume we know everything about the situation based on what's been reported.

If that's the case, then here's what HP did.  They did a harassment investigation on their CEO and found no harassment occurred.  But, as so often happens with investigations, even though the person of interest was cleared on the initial allegation, the investigation uncovered something problematic.

Hurd had submitted expense reports that were less than 100% truthful.

Which brings us to the point of this post.  If you're going to put something like integrity in your company values, you have to be willing to fire anyone for not living up to the value in question.  Even for small breaches of the value in question.

Hurd submitted incorrect expense reports that the board believed showed a lapse in integrity. The board fired Hurd. 

Is there anything that reinforces values more than a tough employment decision to remove someone from the company?  Enron and Healthsouth had integrity as a core value.  They openly publicized it.  How did that turn out for them?

Big, idealistic value statements for your company only work if you walk the walk.  If everyone sees people playing the gray areas or the margins related to the values, they become dead weight.  Everyone knows the values in question mean little, if anything.

How do you get past that cynicism related to a big value like "integrity"?  Simple, you fire people for seemingly small issues with integrity, and then you make sure people know that you've done that.  You keep doing that until there aren't anymore small integrity issues to make examples of. (Of course, you also take care of the big issues, but if you leave the small ones, the value still becomes dead weight...)

Hard decisions, specifically to fire people for small issues related to values, are the only way to institutionalize big, idealistic values.