A challenge in knowledge intensive firms is to inspire the employees to acquire and use knowledge to achieve strategic intentions without performing top down management. At an empirical level, it has been argued that semantics can be a liberating intellectual force promoting creativity and innovation. The purpose of this paper is to generate knowledge about alternative approaches for bringing strategic intentions into continuous and dynamic value creating actions. The study is an explorative single-case study. It has an ethnographical flavour in that we were ‘part of the organization’ in formal and informal settings in several periods. We started with interviews with the top management and the study of secondary material, interpretations of the empirical material were constantly ‘confronted’ with abstract concepts and frameworks that in turn influenced our interpretations of the company, contexts, events and processes. The generation of knowledge followed a trajectory we could call ‘hermeneutic spiralling’ from context to text. At the theoretical level it has been argued that verbs describe the dynamics of processes and will reflect how to perceive and manage them. However, our study indicates that the important words for bringing strategic intentions into value creating actions are adjectives. In business publications, we are familiar with the use of adjectives in superlative form like: best/largest/safest used in formal long-term goals. In contrast adjectives in comparative form express continuous improvements which makes them suitable to emphasize dynamic progress. This case study represents an original piece of empirical work on a topic that is under-researched. In turning intentions into value creating actions the use of adjectives in comparative form has a number of practical qualities. They function as a liberating intellectual force that contribute to a decentralizing principle where competent employees get autonomy in their work, and they establish direction for development processes. The construction of a systematic scheme that ties together strategic intentions with focused development processes in a uniform language may have great practical importance on how to guide, direct and inspire knowledge work in organizations.