While strategy and values should never be confused, they should also not be hermetically sealed from one another.  Strategy should have a dimension of moral value, and an organisation's values should be strategic.

Strategy's moral dimension comes from its definition of the deep human needs that its products and services will satisfy.  This is the organisation's purpose.

Wal-Mart was not just about mass retailing; it was, and is, about bringing the advantages of mass purchasing power to ordinary (even poor) people who live in some of the more remote parts of the land.

Southwest Airlines was not just about competitively priced air travel; it wa, and is, about 'democratising the skies,' removing exclusivity from air travel and making it available to the ordinary person, even the poor person.

These two companies (and all of the resilient companies on Collins's list) are not just about returns on investment.

Their returns on investment are the rewards and the measure of successfully fulfilling a purpose that has a higher moral calling.

Companies with purpose have impacted our society profoundly, not by their social responsibility programmes, but by the cores of their business activities.  Resilient companies are resilient because they never fail to address the needs of vast markets.

Helping people to address their legitimate needs is the highest form of ethical activity.  It is 'loving your neighbour as yourself' translated into action.

The deeper the need is that a company satisfies and the greater the scale with which it addresses those needs, the more resilient it will be.

Working for such a higher purpose engages much more of employees' minds and passions, so much more of their thinking is directed at the improvement of the contributions they make.

In this way, resilient companies, which both spur innovation and inspire trust, address the deep human needs, not only of their customers, but also of their employees.


Such companies "spur high margin growth and thereby increase their value, great organisations need only focus inward to find the wealth of unrealised capacity that resides in every single employee," according to Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton in their book, Now, Discover Your Strengths.

People engage fully in their work when they see their work as a vehicle, not only for their material quests, but for their spiritual quests, too.

For people to become fully committed, their work should expand beyond the basic trade-off of skills for income.

In their search for meaning, people need to see their work as an opportunity to use their unique talents to make a contribution to others that is valuable.

The contribution they seek to make, however, is not to the coffers of shareholders, nor to satisfying the excessive indulgences of their customers!

They are most satisfied when they believe that their work makes a difference to people in a much deeper way, in a way that has an almost spiritual dimension and some moral value.

The danger is that employees (and others) come to see an organisation's higher moral purpose as a veneer designed to hook people into the 'false' belief that the organisation is more than a producer of profit for shareholders.

This breeds mistrust of leadership integrity and damages morale, productivity, and innovation far more than if there would have been no suggestion of moral purpose at the outset.

Even some of the companies who collapsed amidst scandals of ethical failures had 'values.'  Enron had values, as did WorldCom and Anderson.

Maintaining the integrity of a higher purpose requires that the organisation live internally to a higher standard of values and ethics than a company that claims to have no such moral purpose or dimension to its business.

A corporate character that can command adherence to high ethical standards without adding bureaucratic layers of compliance and governance regulations needs more than 'values;' it needs a system of values.

A system of values differs from a set of values in that the latter places no weighting on the values.  It does not deal with the inevitable and tough dilemmas that arise from conflicting values.

It does not address the consequence of acting outside the values or, even worse, of undermining the values.  Organisations rarely examine themselves to ascertain the degree to which they have the will and the strength to truly live by their values.

They rarely estimate the estimate the cost in effort and money that will be required to honestly implement their values.


These are factors that distinguish a set of 'motherhood' values from a serious system of values, unique to a particular organisation and designed to serve its strategic objectives and catalyse its growth - a system that has been tested both for its own robustness and for the organisation's capacity to uphold it, a system that speaks clearly not only to what the company's values are, but to how the company manages conflict and dilemmas within its value system and how it deals with the rise of differing value systems in different parts of an organisation.

It is these qualities of a value system that distinguish the resilient companies who inspire trust as they grow from those who grow in unpredictable spurts, often followed by periods of profound disappointment for the financial markets and the employees.

A value system that is tailored to the strategic needs of an organisation gains the support of operational managers, too.  When consistently implemented, it creates a culture that is both challenging and nourishing, one that respects risk, but rewards accountability, on that celebrates not only the glamour of product and market innovation, but also process innovation.

A culture whose strategy embraces moral purpose and whose values have strategic focus achieves permanence and dynamic growth.

It is a culture capable of building a resilient organisation.  It is a culture that 'works.'