This week I was in Switzerland helping our friends at Zesar, a furniture firm, celebrate its 100th birthday.

One hundred years is a long time for a company. Arie de Geus, the former Royal Dutch Shell strategist, cites research that puts the average life expectancy of a company at just 12.5 years.

So what does an organisation that survives for a century do differently?

If Zesar is anything to go by, it changes. A lot. This is a firm that started making bicycles, pivoted to fridges, and ended up making furniture for schools and industries as diverse as cheesemakers and watchmakers.

The products have changed beyond recognition. The way they’re made changes with new technologies. Sometimes even the realm those products operate in changes completely.

But underneath all that change, something stays remarkably consistent: the values.

Giving a talk on Thursday to a group of people from the watchmaking industry, it made me think of my granddad.

James McIntosh was a clockmaker. And recently, my youngest daughter saw some old photographs of him in his workshops, building clocks. We were able to colourise some of them, which makes it feel very real:

PHOTOS

She loved the mess. Prototypes everywhere, test clocks lying around, bits and pieces being tried, adjusted, abandoned, and rebuilt.

And in the middle of all that mess, people working with an extraordinary eye and hand for precision: a creative mess with precise execution. She manages to pull off that balancing act herself.

A very different generation, doing very different things, with the same values.

You see, values traverse time. Products shouldn’t have to, and if you want to last 100 years, products absolutely should change.

There’s something important in that for schools.

Despite what a few Board members inevitably try to tell me each week, the products schools make are not children, and they’re not exam results.

Those are outcomes thanks to the products we build.

The products are the things we actually create: curricula, pedagogies, approaches to assessment, timetables, experiences, ways of working.

And those things should change. They have to change.

Most schools make broadly similar products, using the same curricula and teachers with the same baseline skillset. Yet some have a character, consistency and quality that survives changes in leadership, curriculum, technology and fashion. And they perform several levels up from the average.

I’m convinced that durability comes from values that are genuinely shared and strong enough to traverse time.

Which is why I get nervous when schools tell me they’re going to “refresh our values”.

Refresh them? If they really are your values, what exactly has gone stale?

You might need to find better words for them. You might need to make them clearer. You almost certainly need to ask whether people actually live them.

But if you’re changing the values themselves, that’s something much bigger.

You’re saying the old ones were wrong.

Or you’re saying that you no longer believe in them.

That’s not a refresh.

That’s an overhaul.

And sometimes an overhaul is exactly what’s needed.

Just don’t confuse it with a new set of posters.

Products should evolve. Values should traverse time.

I’m pretty sure that’s what my granddad would say. He’d be 124 this year, and I didn’t know him beyond my sixth birthday. That said, I think I see his values in his great-granddaughter every day.