Core Values Are a Company’s Essential Tenets
Merck Corporate social responsibility Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company Science-based innovation Honesty and integrity Profit, but profit from work that benefits humanity Nordstrom Service to the customer above all else Hard work and individual productivity Never being satisfied Excellence in reputation; being part of something special Philip Morris The right to freedom of choice Winning – beating others in a good fight
that should not change and practices and strategies that should be changing all the time. Core Purpose. Core purpose, the second part of core ideology, is the organization’s reason for being. An effective purpose reflects people’s idealistic mo- tivations for doing the company’s work. It doesn’t just describe the organization’s output or target customers; it captures the soul of the organization. (See the insert “Core Purpose Is a Company’s Rea- son for Being.”) Purpose, as illustrated by a speech David Packard gave to HP employees in 1960, gets at the deeper reasons for an organization’s existence beyond just making money. Packard said, I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. In other words, why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively that they could not accomplish separately – they make a contribu- tion to society, a phrase which sounds trite but is funda- mental.… You can look around [in the general business world and] see people who are interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives come largely from a desire to do something else: to make a product, to give a service – generally to do something which is of value. 1 Encouraging individual initiative Opportunity based on merit; no one is entitled to anything Hard work and continuous self-improvement Sony Elevation of the Japanese culture and national status Being a pioneer – not following others; doing the impossible Encouraging individual ability and creativity No cynicism Nurturing and promulgation of “wholesome American values” Creativity, dreams, and imagination Fanatical attention to consistency and detail Preservation and control of the Disney magic Walt Disney
We’ll often ask people brought together to work on core values to nominate a Mars Group of five to seven individuals (not necessarily all from the as- sembled group). Invariably, they end up selecting highly credible representatives who do a super job of articulating the core values precisely because they are exemplars of those values–a representative slice of the company’s genetic code. Even global organizations composed of people from widely diverse cultures can identify a set of shared core values. The secret is to work from the individual to the organization. People involved in articulating the core values need to answer several questions: What core values do you personally bring to your work? (These should be so fundamen- tal that you would hold them regardless of whether or not they were rewarded.) What would you tell your children are the core values that you hold at work and that you hope they will hold when they become working adults? If you awoke tomorrow morning with enough money to retire for the rest of your life, would you continue to live those core val- ues? Can you envision them being as valid for you 100 years from now as they are today? Would you want to hold those core values, even if at some point one or more of them became a competitive dis advantage? If you were to start a new organiza- tion tomorrow in a different line of work, what core values would you build into the new organization regardless of its industry? The last three questions are particularly important because they make the crucial distinction between enduring core values
Purpose (which should last at least 100 years) should not be confused with specific goals or busi-
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HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1996
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