Back to business | The ESSENTIAL core values of the world's most successful companies revealed

Company core values are a yardstick by which it can measure itself.

They represent the backbone of your organisation; what it stands for, what its mission is and how it intends to set itself out from the crowd. Every day, the company’s core values should be the golden rules that you live by. They should be present in everything you do, and all staff should be confident that they’re being adhered to.

Without core values, you have no direction and no culture to build on. For most major organisations, these values have been honed over decades. Updated to better represent their reason for being. However, if these are just empty words, bandied around to project the image of company culture without any real grounding, then they’re useless. What’s worse, a study by Imperative found that 58% of companies don’t even base their culture on core values – even though 64% of those who do are confident that it’s upped wellbeing and productivity within their ranks.

This is why Executive Grapevine has scoured the messages of some of the world’s top companies, to help you decide what kind of business you want to be – and what message you want to perpetuate to your own staff.