There are phrases that are very easy to say in a management meeting: “The customer always comes first,” “We believe in people,” “Quality above all,” “We are here for the long term.”
As long as the company is growing, the budget is there and customers are satisfied, those statements carry almost no cost. On the contrary, they sound excellent in an investor presentation, on a company website and in a corporate values document.
(Credit: Ziv Elul)
The real test begins when those values start costing money. What happens to “quality above all” when delaying a launch by a month hurts results? What remains of “we believe in people” when an excellent employee fails on an important project? And how committed are we really to the “long term” when the quarterly report demands results tomorrow morning?
That is where the difference between a value and a preference becomes clear. A preference is something we want as long as the price remains reasonable. A value begins where we continue to uphold it even when the alternative becomes more tempting.
In Parashat Vezot Haberakhah, Moses returns to the revelation at Mount Sinai and to the relationship between the people of Israel and the Torah. Rabbi Isaac Arama, author of Akeidat Yitzhak, reads the verse, “They sat down at Your feet; each received Your words,” as an extreme expression of loyalty to identity even when that loyalty carries a cost.
His words should also be understood in the context of the period in which he lived, 15th-century Spain, a world in which questions of faith and identity were far from theoretical.
Rabbi Isaac Arama even uses the stark formulation, “Either a Jew or crucified.” There is no need to read this as a recommendation to seek suffering, and certainly not as a license for a leader to inflict pain on those he leads.
Its importance lies elsewhere: There are commitments people do not hold merely because they are useful. They hold them because giving them up would alter something about who they are.
The American philosopher Harry Frankfurt explored a similar distinction between ordinary desires and deeper commitments through which people define who they want to be.
We want many things: comfort, success, money, a vacation or a promotion. But not every desire is part of our identity. There are things that, if we give them up, we have not merely changed a decision. In a certain sense, we have changed ourselves.
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This distinction matters greatly for organizations as well.
Every company has many goals, but a mature organization should also have a much shorter list of things that are more than goals. They can be called values, principles or red lines. The name matters less than the question: What are we willing to pay to preserve them?
If “integrity” has never cost us a deal, we still do not know how committed we truly are to it. If “people before numbers” has never caused us to sacrifice a number, it may still be mostly a declaration. And if “the customer comes first” applies only when the customer is profitable and easy to serve, it is worth asking what really does come first.
Crises matter so much in the life of an organization precisely because they expose its hierarchy of priorities.
When it is impossible to preserve profit, employees, quality, reputation and speed all at once, someone has to decide what comes before what. That choice shapes organizational culture far more than any sentence hanging on a wall.
I experienced such a situation as a CEO.
We had a business activity that generated very significant revenue, but we came to the conclusion that the way it operated was damaging the quality of our content and undermining what we wanted the product to be.
Changing it meant immediately giving up tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
It was not an easy decision to get through management and the board, and there was certainly room to drag it out longer. In the end, we made the change.
In hindsight, it was also the right business decision. But in real time, it required us to decide whether the principle we talked about still mattered when it appeared on the wrong side of the revenue report.
A similar dilemma, on an entirely different scale, arises around the emerging deal involving ZIM.
The state is required to consider not only price and economic benefit, but also questions of Israeli control, maritime independence, national infrastructure and long-term risk.
In cases like these, there is almost never a clean answer in which all interests align. Sometimes it is possible to build an arrangement that bridges an economic need with principles worth preserving. But first, one has to define what is truly non-negotiable.
That may be the difference between compromise and loss of identity.
A compromise changes the path in order to preserve what matters most. Losing one’s identity means giving up what matters most in order to preserve the path.
There is also a personal lesson here for managers.
We are accustomed to thinking of leadership as the ability to get people to change. But one of a manager’s most important tasks is knowing what within himself is not supposed to change.
Someone who makes every decision anew according to the latest pressure exerted on him gradually shifts from managing reality to being managed by it.
One day it is a major customer, another day a shareholder, then a senior employee, then a storm on social media.
That is not flexibility. It is the absence of an anchor.
Of course, the opposite extreme is also dangerous.
Stubbornness is not a value. A manager needs to change strategy, abandon a product, admit a mistake and pivot when necessary. But to be truly flexible, you need to know what you are being flexible around.
A ship can change course precisely because it has a compass.
This idea also connects for me to the songs I write.
In “Ashiva Li Sasson,” I return to the verse “the angel who redeemed me,” and in “Hallelu” I tried, in a different way, to touch on the connection to our source and to meaning beyond the immediate moment.
Perhaps that is also why the word morasha — heritage — at the end of the Torah feels so powerful to me.
There are things we do not simply choose anew every morning. We received them, we carry them and at a certain point our responsibility is also to pass them on.
After an entire journey, Moses does not leave the people only with instructions on how to act. He reminds them who they are: “Moses commanded us the Torah, an inheritance of the congregation of Jacob.”
An inheritance is not another item in a work plan. It is a point of reference from which one can move in many directions without losing one’s identity.
And in a management world that rightly prizes adaptation, change, speed and pivoting, perhaps it is fitting that the Torah ends with the opposite question:
Not only what are we willing to change in order to succeed, but what are we unwilling to change even when success asks us to do so?
A tool for managers: The price test
Before rewriting the list of corporate values, it is worth choosing just three values and asking:
- What price have we already paid for this value? If there is no concrete example, it may not yet have been truly tested.
- In what situation would we be willing to give up profit, speed or convenience in order to preserve it? A value with no practical limit usually remains a slogan.
- What can still change around it? It is important to distinguish between the principle itself and the way we have implemented it until now. Loyalty to a value does not require rigidity.
- Which decision from the past year tells employees who we really are? Not what we said, but what we chose when two important things came into conflict.
An organization is measured not only by what it achieves, but also by what it refuses to lose along the way.
Because the values that truly define us are not the ones we write on the wall, but the ones we are willing to pay to keep within us.