What if One Value Was Enough?

What if you had to distill the entire essence of your company down to just one fundamental principle?

Most companies pride themselves on having four to seven core values. They typically include something about integrity, excellence, innovation, and customer focus. But when everything is important, nothing is. Multiple core values mostly just compete with each other, creating decision paralysis rather than clarity.

Think about the last difficult decision you made. Did you weigh it against all five of your core values? Probably not. You likely had an intuitive sense of what "felt right" based on one overarching principle that genuinely guides your business.

Take Volvo, for instance. While they surely have multiple stated values, their singular obsession has always been safety. This unwavering focus has shaped their decisions for decades—from product development to marketing to partnerships. When faced with a choice between adding a flashier feature or enhancing safety, the decision is clear.

What would change if you embraced just one core value? For starters, decision-making would become remarkably simpler. Every choice would be filtered through this single lens, creating consistency across your organization. Second, your positioning would become sharper and more memorable. Third, and perhaps most importantly, your team would have absolute clarity about what matters most.

But choosing just one value requires uncomfortable trade-offs. If your core value is “pushing boundaries,” you might have to accept that sometimes stability takes a back seat. If it's “brutal honesty,” you'll need to be comfortable losing relationships that prefer a gentler approach. If it's “radical speed,” you'll have to ship work that isn't perfect, even when your instincts beg for one more review.

The power of a single core value lies not in its perfection, but in its clarity. It eliminates the comfortable hiding places we create with multiple, overlapping values. It forces you to choose what you're willing to be bad at in service of what you've decided to be great at.

But for this to work, your core value can't just be words on a website—it should be visible in every proposal you write, every hire you make, and every project you take on. It should make some decisions uncomfortably easy easy because they clearly violate this central principle.

At the business I run, we actually maintain four core values, and I'll be the first to admit we're not ready to kill three of them. While this thought experiment is powerful, the reality is that a couple of our values tend to drive most of our critical decisions. What matters isn't the whittling down to one—it's being honest about which values drive our tough decisions versus the aspirational ones we honor in calmer moments.

Look at your last three difficult decisions. Which single principle actually drove them? That's your real core value. The rest are just good intentions.