The best companies develop core values that impact their company culture, brand, and business strategies — making them quite unique. Most entrepreneurs adopt the perspective that culture is a luxury rather than a critical foundational element of a strong company. When your organization lacks guardrails and guidelines, which most early stage ventures do, you need to construct boundaries to guide behavior.

“Regardless of your stage, you must set core values that are non-negotiable.” 

Take a look at this list of corporate values: Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence. They sound pretty good, don’t they? Strong, concise, meaningful. Maybe they even resemble your own company’s values, the ones you spent so much time writing, debating, and revising. If so, you should be nervous. These are the corporate values of Enron, as stated in the company’s 2000 annual report. And as events have shown, they’re not meaningful; they’re meaningless.

Most values statements are bland, toothless, or just plain dishonest. And far from being harmless, they’re often highly destructive. Empty values create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility. Values can set a company apart from the competition by clarifying its identity and serving as a rallying point for employees. But coming up with strong values—and sticking to them—requires real guts. If you’re not willing to accept the pain real values incur, don’t bother going to the trouble of formulating a values statement.