Of all the words that I dread, value must be right there at the top along with root canal and paradigm. Words don’t kill people (though a dictionary can, if aimed right), but words can really scare people. It’s not a wonder many people can be found clutching their chests and slumped over their keyboards at 6 PM, with the screen loyally showing a live presentation over Zoom, boasting at the bottom right, the words “Slide 3 of 78”.  Over the years, I have listened, understood, thought that I understood only to listen again to the word “value”. It has an extended family along with its siblings, “Impact”, “Disruption”, “Transformation” and “Synergy”. Recently “AI” too had its adoption papers coming through.  

Value is something that your vendors assure you that they deliver in bucketfuls. Your bank tells you that they add it to your life. Wall Street claims that they create so much of it that at times they have no choice but to store it in a Lamborghini or in an unpronounceable Swiss watch. Of course, it is all for our benefit. 

In the corporate jungle, there exists a creature more elusive than work-life balance and more frequently sighted than actual work: Value. Everyone talks about it. Everyone claims to add it. No one has seen it in the wild. Like God, you hear about it, you worship it but of course you do not experience it.  No one has seen it take birth, but it has crept into PowerPoints, onto Websites and rests smugly like Cleopatra on recruitment brochures

Value, you see, is a mythical beast. Like a unicorn, but with better PowerPoint skills.

Walk into any meeting room or a Zoom call, and you will hear the same incantation: “We are here to add value.” It’s like how the colonial powers landed on foreign shores stating, “We come in peace,” except nobody is quite sure why they are here for peace when there is peace already.

Value can take many forms but key to it is that it stays always invoiceable. Even when your project is 6 months behind schedule and costs have run over so much that they have started panting, Value continues to hold firm.  If anything, the delays and overruns have only happened because even more value is being realised.

Which brings me to a deeply troubling question:
If everyone is adding value to others… Who exactly is consuming it?

The last time I checked, the economy wasn’t a buffet where we keep piling food onto each other’s plates, and no one eats. There must be a silent minority out there huddled in corners consuming this value. The chosen ones. The Value Whisperers. The people who hear their bonus and are actually happy about it.

The rest of us? We’re like chefs in a kitchen where no one orders food. We cook, plate, garnish, and then admire each other’s plating skills. Occasionally, we take a photo and call it “impact.”

Now, here’s another mystery that deserves a Netflix documentary:
Why is adding value so expensive?

Consultants charge by the hour. Lawyers charge by the limb. Bankers charge by what is called “admin fees”. But within all those “Please pay within 30 days of the invoice date” printouts, value became less about what you deliver and more about a colourless, odourless presence which can become what you want it to be. So, when in doubt just use value. 

Of course, if you come out and say value in presentations without a proper set up, you would face the same silent scorn that the guys face, who mangle karaoke songs by carrying tunes like they carry dead bodies. One doesn’t just add value without packaging it. With frameworks. With quadrants. With arrows that go both ways to show “dynamic interaction”, with graphics so impressive that they would get cast in a Hollywood movie.  It is in fact impossible to deliver value without a 60-slide deck because then it’s not value, it’s just… work.

Which leads to the final paradox, the punchline that makes economists smile and accountants weep:
Adding value seems to make one rich.

Not the one receiving it, mind you. The one adding it.

There’s something beautifully poetic about this. The more you claim to enhance others, the more your own net worth improves. It’s like a karmic system designed by a CFO. You uplift others, and your bank balance rises. Whenever questions are raised about value, you can pivot to its sibling, “Impact”. When you run out of PowerPoint graphics to show impact, it’s time to deliver something like “Transformational Disruption” and “Long Term Strategic alignment”. Important is that it should always be like some perfume. You shouldn’t see it or be able to touch it but just smell it off a PowerPoint deck. 

So where does that leave us?

Perhaps value isn’t meant to be hunted or even found. Perhaps it is only meant to be claimed. Declared. Asserted with confidence and a well-designed slide template. In a world where perception is prayed to and reality scorned, the person who says “I add value” loudly enough eventually becomes the benchmark of what value looks like.

And the rest of us?

We nod. We agree. We add value to their value. And somewhere, in a quiet corner of the corporate Amazon, the mythical beast purrs coyly, knowing it will never be captured, only continuously invoiced.

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