Darius Mirshahzadeh recalls an MIT exercise where most CEOs and their employees couldn't articulate their company's core values. The gap between what leaders think they stand for and what people actually know reveals a blind spot in how businesses operate.
I'm in MIT year three, graduating, and we're doing this exercise. They said, hey, okay, we, you know, we all have core values in our business. I want you all to stand up if your company has core values. So 60 of us stand up in the room and so stay standing. If you can say your core values off the top of your head. Half the room sits down. And I'm in that half. I'm like, fuck. I was so mad at myself, you know, like, half the room sat down. Like, this is a room full of people I totally admire who have these great businesses. I'm telling you, some of them are household names. Half of us don't know our own values. We're the CEOs of our own companies, and we don't know our own values. It continued, though. He said, stay standing if your employees know your core values. Half the remaining half sits down. And I was just like, this is crazy. And then he said, stay standing if your customers know your values. The whole room sits down. And I realized, you know, this isn't because they don't want to have core value driven organizations. It's because we're never taught. We're supposed to know our core values. We're never taught, how do you know your core values? We're just taught that we're supposed to have them.
