From Empty Values to Working Principles: A Leader’s Guide

Most corporate value statements fail to live up to expectations. Words like “Integrity” and “Innovation” sit on walls and websites with little impact on daily decisions. A 2020 MIT Sloan study found little to no correlation between most companies’ stated values and their organization’s culture.

Whether you run a startup or a global organization, you’ve probably stared at a blank sheet of paper to develop a mission and create value statements. You want to align your employees, build trust with customers, and set your organization apart from the competition.

Perhaps you want to steer your organization in a new direction, to intentionally pivot away from former behaviors.

Perhaps you’re dealing with the after-effects of a large merger or acquisition and need to craft a unified set of statements that declare: “This is who we are now.”

Your intentions are good, but the results can be highly variable—and the process is often painful.

Maybe you turn to consultants or marketing firms for help. After months of focus groups and countless edits, you proudly release your new company values, complete with carefully planned marketing and change management initiatives.

Six months later, not much has changed. Worse still, some statements now ring hollow—especially the one about “Transparency,” when the promotion process remains as opaque as ever. “We Are Family” feels false after recent layoffs.

I’m not pointing fingers at specific organizations—we can all fall into these traps as leaders.

But instead of crafting better value statements, you need to make actionable principles:

Value statements: Well-intentioned, lofty ideals often disconnected from practical decision-making and actual behavior.

Principles: Clear, bold statements that challenge our instincts and help us make better decisions.

Why Most Corporate Value Statements Fail

There are three reasons why most corporate value statements fail to live up to their promised effect, and why a carefully crafted set of principles can drive alignment and accelerate decision-making.

1. The Low Bar of Basic Virtues

Too many corporate value statements restate a basic human virtue or take a stand on issues no one would disagree with. When companies list Honesty or Integrity as a value, they state the obvious. No organization proudly announces, “We Occasionally Lie.”

Principles, in contrast, guide specific choices. “We Share Bad News Early” drives different behavior than general appeals to honesty.

2. Ambiguity Undermines Impact

To make them easy to remember, value statements often become so vague that they lose power to influence behavior, or leave themselves open to multiple, conflicting interpretations.

“Be Nice” might reduce obvious negative behaviors. But what if someone argues that pointing out errors or process problems in others’ work is not nice? If you don’t correct errors, you could risk injuries or customer complaints.

Compare “Be Nice” to a principle like “Insist on the Highest Standards.” It creates a clear mandate that connects directly to business outcomes and can be measured against concrete benchmarks.

3. Values in Name Only

Too often organizations fail to integrate values into daily operations. At best the values become irrelevant; at worst they’re contradicted by actual behavior. I’ve been guilty of this, saying “I believe in empowerment” while adding, “Just come talk to me first next time.”

I experienced this disconnect early in my management career. Given authority to determine team compensation within a budget, I carefully allocated resources based on performance and growth potential. When I later checked the system, all my allocations had been changed. My manager explained that HR had “made some adjustments to shape the overall budget.” The company stated, “Everyone Is an Owner,” but their actions taught the opposite lesson.

Transforming Values into Principles: Three Essential Steps

Here are three suggestions to transform your values into memorable, actionable principles that drive alignment and accelerate decision-making.

1. Take a Stand on Something That Actually Impacts Decisions.

Principles are useful when they force you to adopt a perspective you might not otherwise hold. They are bold and practical and invite critical thinking. Replace values like “Teamwork” with a principle like “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit,” which addresses the heart of working together in an effective team.

2. Define Exactly What You Mean.

You want the principle to be easy to remember, so a short phrase is better than a long one. But short phrases can leave too much open for interpretation. If the memorable headline feels generic or ambiguous, add text to clarify your intent. HAQM’s leadership principles follow that pattern. Here’s one as an example:

Invent and Simplify: Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here.” As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Note the specificity and challenge in the headline itself: “Invent and Simplify.” You can’t do just one or the other. Each sentence after the headline outlines specific expectations of attitude and behavior. The language is plain and unambiguous. The principle works across all roles—whether you’re building satellites or packing trucks, you can map the words to your actions.

3. Make Each Principle Come Alive Through Your Actions.

While specificity provides the foundation, principles only create value when integrated into the daily rhythm of the business. Don’t make the mistake of only referencing them in company meetings and annual performance reviews. As a leader, you must actively use them yourself. When your teams are stuck, encourage them to look at the principles for perspectives they might be missing. Whether you’re reviewing business plans, evaluating acquisitions, or leading transformations, let the principles challenge your thinking.

Well-defined principles become mental model guardrails for the organization. When teams truly understand these guardrails, they make better independent decisions, allowing more autonomy and freeing leaders to focus on strategy.

Pro Tips for Evolving Your Principles

1. Use Contrasting Principles to Create Productive Tension

At AWS principles like “Deliver Results” and “Bias for Action” balance “Dive Deep” and “Insist on the Highest Standards.” This creates a decision-making framework that encourages multiple perspectives when solving unprecedented problems.

Take the following example: One year at HAQM.com, we projected 135% year-over-year growth in customer demand but had capped our hardware growth to 20%. This wasn’t about optimizing for “Frugality” over “Customer Obsession.” We needed to prioritize customer experience and reduce costs.

The result? We dug deep into our tech stack, finding simple optimizations we’d overlooked. We redesigned major components, making our systems more performant and scalable at a lower cost per customer. We ended the year at 28% hardware growth—missing our 20% target but doing far better than the projected 135%. More importantly, this tension between principles led us to invent new approaches to building scalable systems that became foundational to AWS.

2. Test Principles Against Reality: Keep What Works; Cut What Doesn’t

Regularly assess your principle’s impact and be willing to adjust based on utility. Challenge teams to explain decisions using these principles. If certain principles are consistently ignored, examine whether organizational systems or behaviors might be working against them.

As HAQM’s Leadership Principles evolved, we included my favorite five-word phrase at the bottom of the list: “Unless you know better ones.”

We hire smart, passionate people who need to make decisions in ambiguous circumstances. At our best, we use a combination of our principles, data, intuition, and peer review to test our assumptions. And despite our best efforts, we can come up with the wrong answers (or answers that are mostly right but can be made better). This applies to our principles too.

The effort required to craft meaningful principles is worth it. The payoff comes in better organizational decisions made at higher velocity. When principles are specific, embedded in operations, and regularly evaluated, they transform from mere wall decorations into powerful tools that shape culture and drive success.

Stop writing value statements that sound good. Start building principles that force better choices.

These are my thoughts—unless you know better ones!