I feel that there is a culture and core value revolution going on. I hear from entrepreneurs around the world who are discovering, or “re discovering” their company’s core values, and who are starting to place a greater emphasis on creating their corporate culture. It’s great; perhaps a lashing out at what has happened the past few years on Wall Street?

For those entrepreneurs who go through the process of discovering their core values, I often get a call from them saying “Now that I have them, how do I launch them throughout my company?”

Just yesterday I think I heard the best way to do this.  I was on the phone with an entrepreneur from Arizona, John  Mousheghian, the founder of Billingtree.com.  I  first met John while I was lecturing at the EO/M.I.T Entrepreneurial Masters Program.  John is  a pretty passionate and serious entrepreneur, who has spent the past 6 months with his team ”re discovering” his company’s core values. He did the “Mission to Mars” exercise, an exercise where you and your senior team, if you were to re – create your company on Mars, select the five people you would put on the spaceship to Mars and their traits/characteristics.  (and you strip out performance whern you select the five people.)

From this excercise, his team came up with a good set of core values. So I asked him “how are you going to launch this to your 150 employees? And that is when I heard a great answer.

“We told everyone that we did the Mission to Mars exercise, so everyone is curious to know who we put on the spaceship. So when we formally launch our core values, we are going to announce the five people who we selected to go to Mars. And we are going to reward them for being the key five people.”

What a great way to kick start your core values!  If I were John, I would create stories around all five of the individuals,  and tell each story at the kick off party.  Not only will these five people feel great about their contribution to the Company, they will probably go on to be the champion of their core values.  Furthermore, their peers will now understand what kind of behavior is important and what kind of behaviour will be rewarded by John and his senior team.

He would then have his  first five legendary stories about their core values, that can be told again and again to re – enforce what is truly important to their organization. (In our company, Nurse Next Door, I recently asked a new employee, Todd,  what core value stood out to him and if he had a story about it. He responded with a core value story that happened 8 years ago – awesome!  It means that certain stories have become legends in our culture!

What are you going to do to kick start the living of your core values?

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