When I first joined Intel 22+ years ago, I was introduced so the Intel Values as part of a new employee orientation class and like many others I thought to myself “Oh joy, time to start drinking the corporate kool-aid…”.  As time passed I began to appreciate that what I saw as the cornerstone of our culture, the Intel Values, wasn’t just suit propaganda at all but instead some pretty obvious, but often time overlooked, concepts that can be incorporated not only across disciplines but into personal life as well.  I’ll now share with you these values in my own words, you are free to read the Intel definitions of course but I can tell you that I’m posting here comes from me; my interpretation after a long successful (and still going!) career with the company..
Risk Taking: To me this means seeking out the highest visibility riskiest project I can find and then jumping in with both feet in search of leadership opportunities.  This isn’t exactly what Intel had in mind with this value but to me it has been a great interpretation.  Either the project ends up a huge success and there is a tremendous amount of satisfaction in completing something that many thought was possibly a bit crazy, or the project doesn’t do so well.  For the latter, one might call that a failure but I call it a success provided that it was executed with dedication, competency and good intentions. I work hard to role model these traits, as do many of my peers, so often times when projects don’t succeed its usually because it was a gamble and there were circumstances out of our control that didn’t pan out; that is an acceptable outcome provided it was understood from the beginning of the project.
Quality:   This quote really says it all for me.  I first saw it taped on the mirror behind a good friend of mine’s desk back in high school.  He wasn’t a great student, in fact he had some learning disabilities, but his motivation was second to none.  I read this and it just clicked for me for the rest of my life…

Great Place To Work: This is kind of a fun one because there are so many variables that people use to make this determination.  I’m not about to go into all of them, I’ll just tell you thins, for me its about the people.  Yeah, the more tangible benefits are important (pay, schedule, perks, etc.) and those are generally what’s used to  rank companies and I can’t really explain Intel’s drop to #243 but I can tell you the people that I work with are top notch; rarely do you find someone that takes themselves too seriously and we value having fun as much as we do making progress.  I’ll take that kind of atmosphere any day!
Discipline:    Not much to say about this one.  To me it’s enough to quote the old saying “Do what you say and say what you do.” Another quote that I think about when I think about this value is from my old GM “On time, to spec, within budget” is really all he ever cared about 🙂
Customer Orientation: Here’s another that I think I have a slightly different spin on than what was intended.  To me this means that the customer is not always right but it does mean that there always an important customer perspective and its our job to understand it. Often times requests are made or questions asked without a full understanding of the technology so the real job is looking behind the question they asked to get to what is that they really want to know – most of the time they don’t know how to ask…
Results Orientation:  Have you ever been on a project that missed the exit?  It’s far to easy to do especially when the project is large and involves a matrixed organization or multiple disciplines.  This is all about keeping your eye on the ball; maintaining laser focus on the deliverables and not being afraid to call out a situation that has materialized that is somehow no longer aligned to the original goals.

So how do these values fit into the Occupational Health vector?  It’s simple – whether your company has a similar published set of values or not doesn’t matter.  You can incorporate these things into your own personal work style regardless of whether they’re printed on a poster in the break room or not.  You can also merge these into your family values as well; I bring home many tools and techniques home from work and, much to the pleasure of my family I’m sure, I find them very useful!