How the most successful companies live their values

DKDaniela KirovaContributing writer · Psychology, New Bulgarian University

Microsoft. Apple. Say the names and you already picture the values slide: teamwork, integrity, innovation. Nice words. The trouble is, they're shared by millions of other firms too, including some of the biggest losers on the S&P 500 in the first quarter of 2019. So the words themselves aren't the story.

What actually separates these companies, I've come to think, is what they do with the words once they're on the wall. Let's look at how some of the biggest companies in the world put their values into practice.

Why do core values matter for growth?

Here's a stat worth sitting with. A 2019 Glassdoor survey of 5,000 adults across the US, Germany, France, and the UK found that more than half felt their company's culture shaped their job satisfaction more than their paycheck did. And 79% said they'd study a company's values and purpose before even applying for a job there.

That tracks with other data too: a 2020 McKinsey survey of US workers found that two-thirds of non-executive employees say work largely defines their sense of purpose. Values give people something to live by. Done well, that shows up in productivity, in engagement, and eventually in the bottom line.

Values also do something quieter but just as important. They tell employees, customers, and clients what your organization actually stands for, and what makes it different from the outfit down the road.

They can pull teams together around something bigger than a quarterly target, too.

And organizations with clearly defined values tend to attract, and keep, the kind of people who already believe in them. That's not a small thing. It's a filter, working for you before anyone's even applied.

Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Comcast: living by integrity

When Brian Chesky co-founded Airbnb, he skipped the obvious choices, honesty, integrity, the usual suspects, and built something more specific to what the company actually was:

Champion the mission
Be a host
Start multiple businesses
Embrace the adventure

Notice how directly these connect to the actual product. Hosts get safety guidelines and constant reminders about security, all in service of one goal: a consistent, trustworthy stay for guests anywhere in the world. The values aren't decoration. They're instructions.

Coca-Cola's list is longer, integrity, leadership, collaboration, quality, passion, diversity, accountability, and each one comes with its own slogan. For accountability: If it is to be, it's up to me. Catchy. But accountability, in my experience, is exactly where most companies quietly fall apart. A 2012 Harvard Business Review study by Darren Overfield and Rob Kaiser, drawing on a database of more than 5,400 upper-level managers, found that roughly half received poor ratings on holding people accountable. It's the value everyone claims and almost nobody enforces.

Coca-Cola's social impact page shows the diversity value showing up in supplier diversity programs, human rights guidelines, gender diversity targets. They also built Employee Inclusion Networks, employee-led resource groups that anyone at the company can use. That's a value with legs.

Comcast leans on integrity too, defined about as plainly as you can: "doing what's right and treating people the right way." Their Project UP, aimed at digital equity, backed that up with a pledge of $1 billion and a goal of supplying tens of millions of people with affordable internet. Say what you want about telecom giants. That's a values statement with a dollar figure attached.

When industry shapes the values: Disney

Sometimes the industry writes half the values statement for you. Disney's are optimism, decency, community, and storytelling, and they're about as specific as values get.

Optimism makes sense for a company built on theme parks and animation. You're selling a mood, essentially, and it needs to be a hopeful one.

Storytelling sits at the center of the whole enterprise, and decency matters enormously when your customer base includes children.

It takes real nerve for a business to take a stand on something contentious. The risk is obvious: plenty of people will disagree, and you might lose them as customers. That alone is enough to make most companies quietly back away from doing anything bold.

Ben & Jerry's hasn't backed away. Their own words: their social mission "compels us to use our company in innovative ways to make the world a better place."

That commitment got tested directly. After Unilever sold the Ben & Jerry's brand in Israel to its local licensee, Avi Zinger, Ben & Jerry's tried to block the sale in court. Their argument was that selling in the occupied West Bank ran against their values. The founders, both Jewish, have been public about disagreeing with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Ben & Jerry's went further, filing a lawsuit to reclaim their trademark and asking the court to stop Zinger from selling ice cream in the West Bank.

The parties eventually settled. Zinger now sells Ben & Jerry's throughout Israel and the West Bank under the Hebrew and Arabic trademarks.

Microsoft's core values: respect and accountability

Microsoft, a genuine giant of the tech world, has built its culture around people. Three values anchor it: respect, integrity, accountability. Their statement on respect reads:

We recognize that the thoughts, feelings, and backgrounds of others are as important as our own.

Is that part of why the company has lasted? Possibly. A Harvard Business Review study involving almost 20,000 employees worldwide found that respectful leader behavior has the single biggest impact on employees, more than most things you'd guess would top that list.

Respect, in practice, is mostly small stuff: kindness, courtesy, treating people well even when you're not expecting anything back from them. It doesn't mean agreeing with everyone on everything. It means making room for real debate, conducted with respect rather than contempt.

And it means extending that respect even to people you don't think have earned it yet. That's the harder version, and the one that actually counts.

On accountability, Microsoft says it accepts full responsibility for its actions, decisions, and results, and backs that up by monitoring supplier organizations to ensure responsible sourcing, with active measures against forced labor.

Toxic workplaces, in my experience, almost always trace back to a failure of accountability somewhere. Sometimes leaders won't hold themselves to account. Sometimes they won't hold their people to account. Often it's both at once.

Accountability is hard to enforce from a policy document. It helps to set fair, clear expectations up front, and to actually reward people who follow through on the value rather than just talking about it.

The sports giants: playing to win vs. playing for the community

Adidas frames its values in explicitly competitive terms. Their motto, "We play to win," doesn't leave much room for interpretation.

They want to change lives through sport and have chased the goal of being "the best sports company in the world" since the day they were founded.

Like the athletes they sponsor, they say, the company refuses to settle for average. Employees show up to build and sell the best fitness and sports products in the world, with the best possible experience for the people buying them.

Sustainability gets a mention in their values too, an area where, by their own admission, they're still lacking.

They close with a pledge to stay connected and engaged with buyers.

Nike, meanwhile, remains the biggest and most valuable sports apparel company on the planet. Its market cap has, at various points, run more than twice that of Adidas, the next most valuable player in the space, though both figures shift significantly with the stock market.

Nike's values point in a different direction: diversity, community, social responsibility. They offer up to 12 weeks of paid leave for employees called to active military service, and have repeatedly earned a perfect 100 score on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, one of the longest-running streaks of any company on the list.

What do they have in common?

Here's the uncomfortable overlap: both companies have faced forced labor allegations.

A Guardian investigation cited researchers from Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and Agroisolab in Juelich, who found traces of cotton from Xinjiang, China in Adidas and Puma shirts and T-shirts, this despite both companies having promised to stop sourcing from the region once evidence of widespread forced labor there became public.

Nike has its own Xinjiang connection. A 2020 report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found hundreds of young women from the Uyghur ethnic group being forced, by the government, to make Nike shoes at the Taekwang factory in Laixi. That factory, South Korean-owned, was one of Nike's biggest suppliers, producing Shox, Air Max, and other signature lines, roughly 8 million pairs of Nike shoes a year.

After the report came out, Nike said the factory would stop using Uyghur workers, stating on its website that none remained following "an independent third-party audit."

Keeping up with the times: Apple's shifting values

Like Microsoft, Apple keeps its values short and clear. They're listed on Apple's website, each one linked to further resources.

Accessibility, environmental protection, and privacy sit at the center. Apple's stated belief is that technology should be available to everyone, and that the more people who get to leave their mark on it, the more powerful it becomes.

These aren't just words on a page, either. Apple builds serious privacy protection into its products, giving people real control over their data: transparency around app tracking, the ability to lock photos in a private album, and Safari's built-in tracker-blocking. You can point to the feature and trace it back to the value.

A shift from earlier values

It wasn't always this polished. Back in 1981, Apple's values were looser and more conversational, things like "going on an adventure together" and "setting aggressive goals." Fair enough for a scrappy startup finding its feet. As the company grew into a corporate giant, the values grew up with it.

There's a pattern here worth noticing: the values of genuinely successful companies tend to be actionable and clear. The vague ones, the hard-to-implement ones, tend to become a liability rather than an asset.

Should you copy them, or build your own?

If you're running a five-person startup and you bolt on a value like "diversity" because it sounds right, it probably won't do much. Values need to fit the size and shape of the company they belong to. If you're building your own list, the free Company Values Builder is made for exactly this — it suggests values that fit your company and pairs each with the behaviors and rituals that keep it honest. Here's a fairly typical list for small businesses:

We believe in family.
Go the extra mile.
Dedication to customers.
Confidentiality.
Enjoy the ride.
Team members always come first.
We embrace change.
Love powers grit.
Sense of adventure.
Transparency.
When the team members win, the company also does.

Young or small companies should brace for some chaos, honestly, for better and for worse. As they grow and stabilize, a value like "sense of adventure" often quietly disappears. Airbnb kept it, though, all these years later. Maybe that's less a company value and more a traveler's creed, a reminder to stay ready for whatever shows up when you go somewhere new.

Successful startups tend to share a similar cluster: customer focus, transparency, integrity, respect, innovation, recognition, passion. What's interesting is how much overlap there is with what the big corporations claim too. The words were never really the differentiator. Applying them is where it all gets decided.

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