Every company has them. They live on the lobby wall, the careers page and the back of the lanyard, and they are nearly always the same handful of words.

So we put a sceptic opposite a brand consultant who has run more values workshops than she cares to count, and asked the questions most founders are too polite to ask aloud. Our consultant is a composite of the people who do this work for a living. The sceptic is entirely real. Possibly it’s you.

Start simple. What are brand values?

Brand values are the few principles that decide how an organisation behaves when its options conflict, shown to customers and staff through what it does and what it tolerates rather than what it prints on the wall.

Everything else is wallpaper.

Why do all company values sound the same?

Integrity, innovation, excellence. I’ve read that list a hundred times. Why is it always the same?

Because they are the safest words in the language. Integrity turns up on roughly two in three big-company values lists, with collaboration and customer focus close behind. Nobody ever got fired for putting “respect” on a poster.

Is that so bad?

Ask Enron. Its 2000 annual report listed four values: communication, respect, integrity and excellence. The same words hung in the lobby. On 2 December 2001 it filed for what was then the largest bankruptcy in American corporate history.

That’s a cheap shot. Enron was a fraud. You can’t blame the poster.

Agreed, and that’s the point. The words weren’t the problem; they weren’t connected to anything. Nobody was hired or fired against them. Decoration has never stopped anyone doing anything.

So how do I spot a decorative value?

Run the opposite test. Flip the value and ask whether any respectable competitor would proudly claim the reverse. Nobody advertises dishonesty. Nobody aspires to mediocrity.

If the opposite is absurd, you haven’t made a choice. You’ve described the minimum requirement for being in business at all. Integrity is like a working fire exit: essential, and also not a personality.

So what makes a value mean something?

Then what does a real one look like?

It costs something. More precisely, it tells you which good thing loses when two good things collide.

Patagonia lists “Not bound by convention” among its values, alongside environmentalism. On Black Friday, 25 November 2011, it ran an advertisement in The New York Times headlined “Don’t Buy This Jacket”, arguing that every garment carries an environmental cost. A clothing company telling people not to buy clothes on the biggest shopping day of the year is a value with a price tag.

Patagonia’s Worn Wear stories argue for keeping a jacket for years rather than buying a new one.

In September 2022 Yvon Chouinard went further, transferring ownership to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective, a non-profit that receives the profits the business doesn’t reinvest. The company’s own summary: the Earth is now its only shareholder.

Patagonia is everyone’s favourite example. Give me something less saintly.

Johnson & Johnson. Its credo, written in 1943 by Robert Wood Johnson, ranks its responsibilities in order: patients, doctors and nurses first, then employees, then communities, with stockholders last.

In 1982, after cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules killed seven people in the Chicago area, chief executive James Burke recalled around 31 million bottles at a cost of roughly US$100 million. Patients before profit, exactly as the ranking says.

The ranking is the clever part. Most values lists are a pile. A ranked list tells a manager what to do at two in the morning when every option is bad.

Show me the behaviour, not the adjective

Most companies aren’t going to give themselves away. What should an ordinary business do?

Stop thinking of values as adjectives. Think of them as behaviours you could catch someone doing.

Netflix’s culture deck, first written in 2009, put Enron’s lobby values on one of its opening slides, then argued that a company’s real values are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted or let go. Its managers still apply a keeper test: would you fight to keep this person if they said they were leaving? You may love that culture or loathe it. You can’t call it vague.

Zappos had ten values, including “Deliver WOW Through Service” and “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness”. Easy to mock. Harder to mock is what the company paid to protect them.

Zappos treated its ten core values as something to pass on, not pin up.

New call-centre staff went through weeks of paid training, and about a week in they were made The Offer: quit now, get paid for the time worked, plus a bonus. It started at US$100 and had reached US$1,000 by 2008. Around one in ten took the money.

Paying people to leave sounds expensive.

Cheaper than keeping the wrong ones. That’s the whole logic of a value. Visible cost now, to avoid an invisible one later.

Toyota built the same logic into a cord. On its production lines, any worker who spots a problem can pull the andon cord to call for help and, if the fault isn’t fixed, stop the line. “Quality” is a word. A line worker halting a car plant is a value.

Haier made the point louder. In the mid-1980s, with the factory close to bankruptcy, Zhang Ruimin responded to a customer complaint by ordering employees to smash 76 defective refrigerators with sledgehammers. Nobody in the building needed the new quality standard explained twice.

How do you test whether your values are real?

I’ve got a values poster in reception. How do I know if it’s real?

Ask five questions. If you can’t answer each one with a specific story, the value is decorative.

1. Would a respectable competitor choose the opposite?
2. When did this value last cost us money, a customer or a hire?
3. Have we ever hired, promoted or let someone go because of it?
4. Could the most junior person invoke it against the most senior one?
5. Could a customer guess it from experience, without reading our website?

What if two of my values contradict each other?

Good. Then they’re doing some work.

Grab, which Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling founded as MyTeksi in Kuala Lumpur in 2012, describes its culture through four Hs: Heart, Hunger, Honour and Humility. Hunger casts its people as disruptors and builders. Humility asks them to own their mistakes.

Grab co-founder Anthony Tan on growing the company from start-up to Nasdaq listing.

Hunger without humility is arrogance; humility without hunger is a pleasant company that loses. The tension between the two is where judgement lives, which is exactly the job values exist to do.

Does any of this survive real pressure?

Pressure is where it shows. During the attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, staff at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel put guests’ safety ahead of their own, and some lost their lives.

The Taj group had long recruited for integrity and a sense of duty ahead of polish, and its people valued recognition from guests and colleagues more than money. Nobody improvises that behaviour on the night. It is selected, trained and rewarded for years beforehand.

What happens when values get expensive?

Here’s my cynical question. What happens when the values start costing real money?

Then you find out which were values and which were strategies in a values costume.

Southwest Airlines has long hired for what it calls a Warrior Spirit, a Servant’s Heart and a Fun-LUVing Attitude. Its brand was bound up with generous habits too: two free checked bags, open seating.

After the activist investor Elliott built a stake of more than 10% in 2024, things moved quickly: the first layoffs in the airline’s history in February 2025, the end of free checked bags that May, and the end of open seating in January 2026.

So Southwest abandoned its values.

I wouldn’t say that, and I’d be wary of anyone who says it from the outside. Free bags were a policy; the values were about people. But customers don’t read the distinction in your handbook. They experience the brand as one thing, so when the policies they loved disappear, the values have to prove themselves somewhere else, visibly, or people assume they went too.

GitLab offered a sharper lesson in May 2026. Alongside a restructuring, it retired CREDIT, its six values of Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration and Transparency, which the company credited with carrying it to a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue. Three operating principles replaced them: speed with quality, an ownership mindset and customer outcomes.

Much of the reaction fixed on the words that had vanished, diversity and inclusion among them, rather than the ones that arrived. A values change is always read as a strategy memo. So write it as one: say plainly what you’re giving up and why, because people will work it out anyway.

Writing values that survive Monday morning

Last one. How do I write values that aren’t wallpaper?

Start with a small group. Five or six people who know the business intimately will produce sharper values than a company-wide survey, which tends to average everything back into “integrity”.

Then mine what’s already true. Collect the stories staff tell about the business at its best and the things customers praise without being asked. Some of your real values already exist. Nobody has written them down.

Write each one as a sentence with a verb and a cost. Picture a precision-engineering firm in Jurong whose poster says “Excellence”. Rewrite it: we would rather miss a deadline than ship a part we wouldn’t fit to our own machines. Now sales knows what to tell an impatient customer, and the shop floor knows it is allowed to say no.

Keep the list short. The typical large company lists about five, and five is too many if three of them are fire exits.

Finally, wire them into the interview scorecard, the onboarding week, the promotion conversation and the exit meeting. A value that never appears in those rooms isn’t a value.

My team rolls its eyes at our values. Some say they only come out at appraisal time, as a stick.

That’s the other way values die. If a value only surfaces when someone is being marked down, staff learn it’s a weapon, not a promise. Measure the leadership team against the values first, and out loud. Then reward someone for living one, publicly, before anyone is ever penalised for missing it.

And the proof any of this matters commercially?

The polished statement on the website predicts very little. What matters far more is whether employees believe the people at the top behave honestly and decently. So values work isn’t really for the wall. It’s for the leadership team, who will be watched closely to see whether they mean it.

Before we stop the tape

What are brand values?
Brand values are the few principles that guide how an organisation behaves and makes trade-offs, visible to customers and staff in its actions rather than its slogans. Strong values describe choices a reasonable competitor might make differently.

How many brand values should a company have?
Most organisations work best with three to five. Fewer is fine if each one is specific enough to settle a real decision; a longer list usually means some are generic minimum standards rather than genuine choices.

What is the difference between brand values and company values?
Company values guide how people inside the organisation behave, while brand values are how those principles show up for customers. In a healthy business they are the same set, because customers eventually experience whatever staff are rewarded for.

If your reception wall is starting to read like Enron’s, book a values workshop that ends in behaviours you can hire for.