ThemeProcess & Planning
CardCard 60 of 64
Questions5 to explore

Values

Core believes that guide your brand

Values without behavior are just decoration.

Brand values are the core principles that are supposed to guide decisions, shape culture, and show up consistently in how the brand behaves. At their best, they create coherence: a customer who reads the values should be able to predict how the brand will act in an unfamiliar situation. At their worst, they are a list of aspirations that nobody checks against actual decisions.

The brands that make values work embed them in specific behaviors and decisions rather than leaving them at the level of nouns (integrity, innovation, community). A value is operational when it answers the question: what would we do differently in a specific situation because we hold this value? If the answer is nothing, the value is not real.

How strong brands handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are approaches and illustrations from how brands tend to work, not rules, and never a ranking of companies.

Values that cost something

REI's decision to close stores on Black Friday and pay employees to go outside is a values demonstration that costs real revenue. It is memorable and credible precisely because it is not free.

Values as hiring and firing criteria

Zappos was known for using cultural fit as a hiring and parting criterion, sometimes paying new hires to leave if they did not feel aligned. The operationalization of values through HR decisions signals that they are real.

Values in product decisions

Apple's stated value for privacy has led to product decisions (App Tracking Transparency, on-device processing) that have real engineering and commercial costs. The value is visible in the roadmap.

Co-created vs top-down values

Values developed collaboratively with employees tend to have stronger internal adoption than those handed down from leadership. GitLab's publicly documented handbook is an example of values codified collaboratively and referenced for actual decisions.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Which of our stated values has cost us something, and which ones have never been tested by a real decision?
How would a new employee learn what our values look like in practice, not just what they are stated as?
If our customers read our values, would they recognize them in how we have treated them?
Which of our values is most distinctive, in the sense that another company in our space would not claim the same one?
When we have made decisions that went against our values, how did we handle that internally and externally?

Things to notice

Value inflation is common: companies list many values to avoid leaving anything out, which means none of them are actually prioritized when they conflict. Fewer, more specific values are usually more useful.
Values that are indistinguishable from those of every other company in the category (trust, innovation, excellence) are brand-neutral at best. Distinctive values are the ones that actually differentiate.
Public values create public accountability. Stating them clearly is also an invitation for scrutiny, which is the point but also the risk.