Core Values: How to Define Yours (With Examples)

Core values are a small set of principles that tell you how to act when the right answer is otherwise unclear. They are not slogans for the website wall; they are decision filters. When two good options trade off — speed versus quality, candour versus harmony, profit versus reputation — values are what break the tie.

James Clear and other habit writers popularised values as identity ('I am the kind of person who…'), which overlaps with how organisations use them in hiring and promotion. The mental model angle is simpler: values reduce decision fatigue by pre-committing to a pattern of choices before the pressure arrives.

Consider the difference between a company that lists 'innovation' on its lobby wall and one that promotes the engineer who killed a profitable product because it no longer served customers. The first has a slogan. The second has a core value. The test is always behavioural: values that never cost you anything are not values — they are marketing. Patrick Lencioni, author of The Advantage, put it starkly: if you are not willing to accept the pain real values incur, do not bother going to the trouble of developing a values statement. Real core values function like an immune system — they reject decisions, hires, and strategies that look attractive on the surface but conflict with the organisation's identity at a structural level.

Personal core values govern individual decisions — what career to pursue, how to spend your time, which relationships to invest in. Organisational core values govern collective behaviour — who gets hired, how conflicts are resolved, what trade-offs are acceptable at scale. The two overlap but they are not identical, and confusing them creates problems in both directions.

When a founder's personal values are projected onto a growing company without translation, the result is often an unwritten culture that works for people who think like the founder and bewilders everyone else. Steve Jobs valued aesthetic perfection to a degree that made Apple extraordinary and also made him, by many accounts, extraordinarily difficult to work with. That value needed to be encoded into design review processes and hiring rubrics — not simply assumed as a personality trait every hire would share.

Conversely, when an individual adopts an employer's stated values without reflection, they outsource their moral compass to an institution whose incentives may shift. Enron's published values included 'integrity' and 'respect.' The lesson is simple: define your personal values independently of any organisation. Then find environments where those values are rewarded rather than punished. Alignment between personal and organisational values is the strongest predictor of both sustained performance and long-term satisfaction, because it eliminates the cognitive drain of pretending to be someone you are not.

Start from behaviour, not adjectives. List five moments you are proud of and five you regret; extract what the proud moments had in common and what the regrets violated. Turn those into verbs and constraints, not nouns. 'Integrity' is vague; 'We tell customers the truth before we bill them' is testable. Keep the list short — more than five values usually means none of them win when they collide.

Pressure-test each value against a real past decision: if no past decision would have changed, the value is decoration. Ray Dalio at Bridgewater uses the phrase 'principles' rather than 'values' precisely because principles can be back-tested against situations. He documents decisions, records the principle that guided them, and reviews whether the outcome validated or contradicted the principle over time.

Finally, publish them where they create accountability: job rubrics, review templates, investor updates, and rejection criteria. A value that lives only in a slide deck has no teeth. Amazon's leadership principles work because they appear in interview scorecards, promotion packets, and post-mortems — every mechanism where behaviour meets consequences. Write values that you can point to in real time, not values that require an offsite retreat to remember.

If listing moments of pride and regret feels abstract, use a structured framework. First, the peak-experience exercise: recall three to five moments in your career or life when you felt most energised and effective. For each, write down what you were doing, who you were with, and what made it meaningful. The recurring themes across those moments are likely your core values in disguise.

Second, the funeral test — borrowed from Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: imagine what you would want said at your eulogy. The gap between that aspiration and your current behaviour reveals which values you hold in theory but have not yet operationalised. Third, the 'hell yes or no' filter from Derek Sivers: for any commitment that is not an enthusiastic yes, default to no. This is a value of focus and intentionality encoded as a decision rule.

For organisations, add a fourth step: the trade-off matrix. List every value candidate and pair them against each other. When 'speed' and 'quality' conflict, which wins? When 'transparency' and 'employee privacy' conflict, which wins? Any value that never loses a trade-off is either genuinely paramount or has not been tested honestly. The matrix forces the hard conversations that slogans avoid and produces values that actually function as decision-making tools under pressure.

Goals describe outcomes you want to achieve. Values describe how you intend to behave along the way. The distinction matters because goals change with circumstances while values, if chosen well, remain stable across decades. Jeff Bezos famously anchors Amazon's strategy to things that will not change — customers will always want lower prices, faster delivery, and wider selection — rather than chasing trends. Those are effectively values masquerading as strategy.

When values and goals conflict, values should win. A goal of doubling revenue this quarter is worthless if achieving it requires violating your value of honest customer communication. The company that hits the number by hiding fees will lose the trust that made the number possible. Short-term goal attainment purchased with values erosion is a form of borrowing from your future self at a ruinous interest rate.

Goals are also motivational — they create urgency and focus. But goals without values create a vacuum that gets filled by whatever behaviour is expedient. Wells Fargo's cross-selling scandal is the canonical example: employees had aggressive account-opening goals but no operationalised value of customer consent. The goal dominated, fraud followed, and billions in fines resulted. Values are the guardrails that keep goal pursuit from becoming destructive. Think of values as the constraints in an optimisation problem — they narrow the solution space so that the goals you do achieve are ones you can sustain.

The strongest evidence for core values comes from founders who built enduring companies around them. Steve Jobs placed an almost unreasonable value on design simplicity. That value drove Apple to reject feature bloat, to control hardware and software together, and to say no to thousands of product ideas for every one they shipped. Simplicity was not a marketing slogan — it was a constraint that shaped every engineering and design decision the company made for decades.

Jeff Bezos encoded customer obsession so deeply into Amazon that it functions as the company's operating system. Leadership principle number one — 'Customer Obsession' — states that leaders start with the customer and work backward. This is not aspirational language; it is enforced through mechanisms like the press-release-first product development process, where teams write the customer announcement before writing a line of code.

Yvon Chouinard built Patagonia around environmental stewardship — a value so central that the company has repeatedly sacrificed short-term profit for it, from donating one percent of sales to environmental causes since 1985 to transferring ownership of the entire company to a trust dedicated to fighting climate change. Chouinard's values were not decorative. They were structural, shaping supply chain decisions, material sourcing, and even the decision to run ads telling customers not to buy their products. In each case, the founder's values became the company's immune system — the thing that prevented expedient decisions from corrupting long-term identity.

Individuals: curiosity over comfort — choosing the harder learning path when the easy one is available; long-term compounding over short-term applause — optimising for where you will be in ten years, not how you look this quarter; health as a prerequisite for performance — treating sleep, exercise, and nutrition as non-negotiable foundations rather than things to sacrifice for productivity; family time as a scheduled priority, not a remainder.

Startups: customer obsession — talking to users weekly, not quarterly; default to shipping — launching imperfect work to gather real feedback rather than polishing in isolation; disagree in writing, commit in public — ensuring that debate is rigorous but execution is unified. Stripe's operating principles include 'move with urgency and focus' and 'be meticulous in your craft.' Note how the pairing forces a trade-off: urgency without craft is sloppiness, craft without urgency is indulgence.

Enterprises: safety first — never compromising physical or data safety for speed; regulatory honesty — reporting violations before they are discovered; respect for the front line — designing policies from the perspective of the people who execute them. Nonprofits: beneficiary outcomes over donor optics — measuring success by impact on the people served, not by the impressiveness of the annual report. In every case, notice that strong values pair a positive with a traded-away good. That trade-off is what makes them real and actionable rather than decorative.

Mistake one: copying Netflix or Google's published values without adapting them to your own trade-offs. Netflix's 'freedom and responsibility' culture works inside a company that pays top-of-market salaries and fires quickly for underperformance. Transplanting 'freedom' without the corresponding accountability structures produces chaos, not innovation.

Mistake two: values that could not reject a candidate. If 'excellence' is a core value, ask what behaviour it forbids. If the answer is nothing specific, it is a platitude. Good values should make at least some competent people uncomfortable — Bridgewater's radical transparency genuinely repels many talented professionals, which is precisely what makes it an effective filter.

Mistake three: never revisiting values after a pivot. The values that fit a five-person founding team may suffocate at fifty people or become irrelevant after a market shift. Schedule an annual values review — not to change them casually, but to confirm that each value still passes the decision-change test.

Mistake four: announcing values without changing incentives. People follow what is rewarded, not what is laminated. If your values say 'collaboration' but your bonus structure rewards individual heroics, collaboration will lose every time. Align compensation, promotion criteria, and recognition rituals with stated values — or accept that the stated values are fiction.

Mistake five: treating values as immutable commandments rather than living principles. Values should be stable but not rigid. When evidence strongly contradicts a value's usefulness, update it — the same way you would update any mental model in light of new data.