Most companies have core values that read like a corporate Mad Libs: integrity, innovation, excellence, teamwork.
Here’s the problem: Harvard Business Review studied 500 companies and found that 55% list “integrity” as a core value. When everyone claims the same values, they mean nothing.
Real core values do two things simultaneously: they attract the people you want and repel the people you don’t. That’s not a bug. It’s the feature.
Zappos discovered this when they made “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness” an official core value. Some candidates walked away. Perfect. The ones who stayed built a company culture so distinctive that Amazon paid $1.2 billion for it.
Jim Collins’s research in “Built to Last” revealed a counterintuitive finding: companies with authentic core values outperformed the market by 15 to 1. But here’s the key—these weren’t aspirational values. They were descriptive. They captured what the company already was at its best.
The test is simple: Would you fire someone who hits their numbers but violates a core value? If the answer is “probably not,” it’s not actually a core value. It’s wall art.
As Patrick Lencioni puts it: “Values should be so integrated into a company’s operations that they become indistinguishable from the way the organization conducts business.”
Your core values aren’t what you wish to be. They’re the heartbeat of what you already are—the truths that make you uncomfortable to compromise, the principles that cost you something to uphold.
The right values don’t make everyone comfortable. They make the right people committed.
