Leading with Your Values
“Who will want to marry you if you go there?”
The moment the word “Oxford” passed my lips, my mother was immediately and implacably on the warpath. It was from there I had just returned, after an unsanctioned trip in my parents’ car for an interview at the university.
Many parents might have expressed support or encouragement, or even pride. But not my mother. To her, a name like Oxford epitomized the British ruling class: the people who had changed her native India so much during the Raj, and were ultimately responsible for her ending up in a place where she was alienated, alone, and the frequent victim of violent racial abuse. She envisioned losing me, her best and only friend in our village, to a place where I would become exposed to drugs, and end up marrying an upper-class white boy called Sebastian.
Marriage. At eighteen, it felt like a cage to be avoided as long as possible: the end of freedom and happiness. Then as now, what I valued most was the power to set the course of my own life, not to be constrained by the expectations of others. For my mother, nothing was more important than that I be married off in the right time and to the right kind of boy: a Sikh, preferably from Punjab, with the appropriate creed, background, and parentage. Both of us feared most what the other desperately wanted. It was the first time in my life I really understood the importance of values. For her, family and heritage held sway. I was moved by the desire for freedom, exploration, and a thirst for knowledge. We both wanted the best for me, but we couldn’t agree on what that was. Our starting points and basic assumptions had become irreconcilable. Our values were in conflict.
All of us will have moments like this in our life, where the choices, challenges, or opportunities facing us reveal something important about our character, desires, and personality. A decision about whether to prioritize professional aims or family needs; to pursue the best-paid job or the most meaningful; to do the things we want, or those that support our health and well-being. We face big, defining decisions, but also a constant drumbeat of choices about how to spend our time. Every day we are making decisions that set both the short- and long-term course of our lives. Whether we acknowledge it or not, these decisions are being steered by the principles we believe in and consider to be most important: values that are working away in our subconscious.
Many of us constantly question how to be our best selves, and live the most fulfilling version of our lives. Those conundrums are hard to answer without an appreciation of values. You need to understand your own values and those that are held dear by your core people, the company you work in and the community you live in. Values hold the key to so many of the things we aspire to. Quite simply, they are the foundation of our entire lives: the lasting and fundamental beliefs we hold and act against, however our circumstances change. Everything else—the decisions we make, the ambitions we nurture, the relationships we build—is simply a representation and amplification of our fundamental values. Our values are running our lives, yet not enough of us understand what they are, their power, and how we can use them. The more we know and understand them, the more clarity we have over what matters to us, and the more confidence we gain in making decisions toward that end. We need to know our values to better understand ourselves and what motivates us. And we need to appreciate the values of the people in our lives, to see the world through their eyes and help us to build sustainable and harmonious relationships.
Values represent the aggregation of our life experiences, personal aspirations, family inheritance, and cultural grounding. They determine the career, the partner, the lifestyle, and the goals that we all choose. And they set the limits on what we believe to be acceptable, fair, and just. We all have a fundamental personal code that we carry through life, and its language is values. A value is something that affects how we see the world, and also what we see. If you have been a victim of racism or social injustice, it is likely that equality and fairness will be important values to you, and that you are more likely to see injustice in the world than someone who has not. My own childhood experience in the Gloucestershire village of Churchdown, where my home was petrol-bombed, my nose broken so other children could see if I would bleed red or brown, and my parents would only leave the house with one of them in the trunk of the car (to avoid people seeing the house was unoccupied), has certainly left an indelible mark on me. We all have unconscious programming like this, based on our life circumstances and experiences. We need to be aware of this so that, rather than letting it guide our lives, we equip ourselves to choose powerfully. This is what an understanding of values helps us to achieve.
That moment with my mother was when I started to understand the importance of values as our personal bottom line. In the decades since, my understanding of how values define us as people, framing the direction we choose for our lives, has grown. And I have developed a clear understanding of why it is so important to both understand and reflect on your values. I believe there are five reasons:
Over the last twenty years, across a career that began in investment banking and shifted into venture capital, international development, and broadcast journalism, I have traveled to almost 150 countries. This journey has opened my eyes to how values define behavior, relationships, and culture all over the world. Reporting for Reuters and the BBC World Service, I have seen up close how values shape the life of a country and its people. Every time I visited a new country to report, I was struck by the same realization. Wherever you go, there is something apparent yet unspoken, a sort of cultural language that dictates so many aspects of everyday life. You notice it on the streets, in the cafés and shops, in business meetings, around kitchen and dining tables, and simply while working your way across the towns, villages, and cities. You see it from how a country responds to major events, to how individuals and local communities interact.
As I visited more countries, I was increasingly inspired by the values I saw, and how they were being used by individuals and communities to create change: to evolve into better versions of themselves. It was reporting from Ladakh, in the far north of India, that this perception settled. Almost two decades before the issue started animating governments across the world, Ladakh had banned single-use plastic bags. The lead came not from NGOs or local government, but a volunteer group, the Women’s Alliance of Ladakh. Outraged by the litter problem that plastics were creating in the hands of both locals and tourists, the Women’s Alliance succeeded in having them outlawed, while manufacturing and selling cloth bags that fund environmental protection and conservation in the local area. It was another twenty years before the Indian government committed to outlawing single-use plastics, way behind the pioneering efforts of the women of Ladakh.
Values are fundamental to us as people, and for organizations they provide the same cultural and moral foundation. When you engage with a company, as an employee, supplier, or customer, you feel the difference when there is a guiding purpose and a strongly held set of values. It makes you feel part of something bigger and more meaningful than a business transaction or an employment contract. Leaders of standout companies like Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever; Ajay Banga, CEO of MasterCard; and Chip Bergh, CEO of Levi Strauss, told me that they use values to make decisions on everything from product development to hiring, remuneration, company culture, and sustainability. In other words, they have built entire business models around a specific set of strong and distinctive values. A company that understands its role and purpose, and is successful at attracting both loyal customers and employees, will invariably be one driven and guided by its values. That is why this is a book as relevant for those starting and leading companies, institutions such as schools, or even their own families, as it is for individuals.
We also live in a world of division, technology, and volatility—one that values are essential to navigating. Values provide an anchor in an environment where the news is being manipulated, politics has become confrontational, and traditional sources of faith have dwindled. Technology bombards us with information and sows personal doubt. As we all seek to make our way in a world where old certainties have been eroded, an understanding of our personal values becomes more important than it has ever been.
Values can spring from different places and parts of our lives. There are those that were instilled in us from a young age, taught and handed down to us, or acquired through experience. And there are those we aspire to, mold ourselves on, and wish to be the defining principles of our life. A value can be intrinsic or it can be adopted: the important thing is that it is entirely true to you as a person, and that you find practical ways to honor and express it.
This book is predicated on the belief that there is no better model for values in action than the countries of the world. The value that defines each country stems from a wide variety of sources—from a nation’s history, its geography, its religious topography, its traditions, its demographics. A nation’s core value has been shaped in many cases over centuries or millennia, handed down from generation to generation, constantly evolving but never fundamentally altering.
As geopolitical, economic, religious, and environmental change has evolved around them, these values have largely remained the same. Indeed in many cases, it is values that have helped sustain nations through crisis and change. Governments, constitutions, colonizers, civil wars, and political movements may come and go. Borders shift, countries are wiped off the map one generation, restored the next, and then altered some more. But values remain, the irreducible core of national culture and identity. American entrepreneurship stems from a promise that has for centuries attracted immigrants to explore new geographical, scientific, and technological frontiers. Pakistani courage is the product of how its peoples have had to fight for their place in the world, ever since its founding in the bloodstained aftermath of Partition. Hungarian competitiveness arises from a history that has seen the country invaded and conquered on an almost unremitting basis since the thirteenth century. French protest is a tradition that connects the gilets jaunes of 2018 with the sans-culottes of 1789. Every nation’s upward spiral, inconsistent and confusing though it may be, has evolved around—and in turn helped to shape—its defining value. Through sharing the stories of values from around the world, illustrating their power and the rich variety that exists, I hope to inspire you to start discovering and making the most of yours.
Of course, to elect a single value for 101 countries is not to suggest that the tapestry of people, communities, and cultures that make up a nation state is homogenous. Nor is it to claim any objective truth about what value should represent a country: the ones chosen here are the fruit of many conversations and passionate debates, and I expect you will disagree with some of the conclusions. The purpose is to illustrate the extent to which a value can inform the life and culture of a nation, and to understand how the same is true of our own lives. However diverse and heterogenous a nation, and however complex and multifaceted a life, it is both possible and valuable to distill down the singular factors that motivate and inspire it. The discipline of trying to understand these core drivers is as important as the conclusion itself.
The book takes you on a tour of 101 countries, explaining and exploring the values that make them tick. I have spent time in every country discussed here, and reported from most of them—in some cases a number of years ago, so I am aware my experiences will not always reflect the changes that have happened since. The experiences and observations included are based on the people I have met, stories I have covered, and the insight I have been offered by a combination of friends, experts, and total strangers.
I have grouped the values into five sections, which reflect the different areas of our lives in which values can help us to make decisions and find direction:
I believe there is a lesson in every country and every value listed here: a perspective on how we can be better in many different ways. They are all important and instructive. But we have to choose. No one has 101 defining values. For each of us, some are always going to be more important than others. The purpose of this book is to help you work out which, and why.
As you read, I encourage you to think about the values that closely reflect your own. What stories inspire you? Which ones have the most relevance to your life and experiences? What values described here do you aspire to? Which relate to the things that make you happiest? What do you read and immediately recognize yourself in? Which values jump out at you? Which ones in your life have been violated or stepped on?
Note down each value that grabs you, the ones that feel most personal and relevant. Make a list, fold the corners of the page, or add highlights on your e-reader. Be discriminating—only choose those values that really feel like you. On average, this should leave you with a list of about fifteen to twenty. At the end of the book, I’ll take you through the process of how to boil down this list to a final five, and how to make use of these values in your personal and professional life. Finally, don’t be restricted by the exact wording of the values outlined here. Everything is open to your interpretation, and indeed I would encourage you to make it personal. If you want to interpret Kenyan togetherness as teamwork, Nigerian drive as making money, or Nicaraguan poetry as the sheer power of language, then go right ahead. Values are whatever you value.
When you’re at the beginning of any process, the end is often a good place to start. At Harvard Business School, you do an exercise where you are asked to imagine what your eulogy will be. What will other people say about you after you’re gone? I found this one of the most clarifying, eye-opening things I have ever done. Once you know the end, the kind of person you want to be and the life you want to live, everything starts to fall into place. The question then becomes how you get there. And the answer to that, is by letting your values show you the way: shaping your aims and guiding your decisions. So let’s get started, and begin the journey of discovering yours.