core values are essential for enduring greatness, but it doesn’t seem to matter what those core values are. The point is not what core values you have, but that you have core values at all, that you know what they are, that you build them explicitly into the organization, and that you preserve them over time.

Your personal core values define who you are, and a company's core values ultimately define the company's character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.

Once they’re defined, you must hire, fire, review, reward, and recognize people based on these core values.

establish a core value that drives the business and helps promote it in perpetuity.

Honesty is a core, core, core value.

Values identify what you stand for. In a sense, these values are the very foundation of your culture, those basic principles on which you are unwilling to compromise. It is extremely important that the values in any organization be clearly articulated for and understood by everyone in that organization.

Core ideology provides the glue that holds an organization together as it grows, decentralizes, diversifies, expands globally, and develops workplace diversity. Think of it as analogous to the principles of Judaism that held the Jewish people together for centuries without a homeland, even as they spread throughout the Diaspora. Or think of the truths held to be self-evident in the Declaration of Independence, or the enduring ideals and principles of the scientific community that bond scientists from every nationality together in the common purpose of advancing human knowledge. Any effective vision must embody the core ideology of the organization, which in turn consists of two distinct parts: core values, a system of guiding principles and tenets; and core purpose, the organization’s most fundamental reason for existence.

If we expect people to live the core values of an organization, we have to be able to tell them what those values look like in action.

fundamental values are not chosen from thin air based on the desires of executives; they are discovered within what already exists in an organization.

Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe. Values are your core principles in life — they might be excellence and generosity, freedom and fairness, or security and integrity.

Apple at the core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. … And that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do.

You must always hire, fire, review, reward, and recognize with your Core Values in mind. Within one year of doing this, you’ll be happier.

SUPREME VALUE CENTERS IN LOVE. All true values are differentiations of this supreme value. The means by which love is differentiated into the infinite variety of its divine nature may be called “truth.” Life is the evidence of the truth of love in action.

It makes sense to describe a core competence as a complex adaptive system, located in the lower regions of the I-Space between an ordered regime in which knowledge assets get frozen into technologies and a chaotic regime in which the stability necessary for effective organizational coordination and integration remains absent. Core competences, then, have their being in a region of the I-Space sandwiched between an excess of usable structure and a total lack of it. We hypothesize that the possession of a core competence is one measure of a firm’s ability to deal with complexity.