The Value of Corporate Values

Abstract

Corporate values are in vogue - but what does the fashion tell us about enduring corporate practice, as it is and as it could be? Increasingly, companies around the world have adopted formal statements of corporate values, and senior executives now routinely identify ethical behavior, honesty, integrity, and social concerns as top issues on their companies' agendas. The meaning of this new emphasis on values, however, is less obvious than the trend itself. So to explore how deeply these values are embedded in organizations and to examine the role that values are playing, in 2004 Booz Allen Hamilton and the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan forum focused on values-based leadership and public policy, conducted a global study of corporations in 30 countries and five regions.