There was a time when many executives could treat corporate values as a branding exercise, a recruiting line, or a paragraph on the company website. That time is over. Today, corporate values are operational. They shape customer loyalty, employee engagement, regulatory attention, shareholder expectations, and public trust. Most importantly for boards and compliance professionals, they shape risk.
That is the central lesson of Corporate Value(s) by Jill Fisch and Jeff Schwartz. Their insight is both practical and profound: managers should select the corporate values that maximize long-term economic value, and to do that, they need reliable information about what stakeholders actually care about. The paper does not argue that corporations should become moral philosophers. It argues for something more useful for the compliance function. Corporate values are part of the long-term value equation, and management ignores them at its peril.
Why This Matters to Compliance
For a corporate compliance audience, this is not an abstract governance debate. It is a board oversight issue. It is a cultural issue. It is an internal controls issue. And it is a warning that values misalignment can become a business crisis long before it shows up in a formal investigation or on a quarterly earnings call.
The paper is particularly strong in rejecting two simplistic views. First, it rejects the notion that companies can operate as if values do not matter. Second, it rejects the idea that companies should chase social legitimacy untethered from business reality. Instead, the authors land where sophisticated boards and chief compliance officers should land: values matter because they affect value, and management needs disciplined ways to understand that connection.
Culture as a Control
That is where compliance comes in. Too often, companies treat culture as a soft concept and values as a public relations topic. Yet every experienced compliance professional knows that culture is a control. It influences decision-making when policy manuals are silent, when incentives are misaligned, and when leaders face pressure. Corporate values, when operationalized correctly, help define that culture. They tell employees, managers, and third parties what the company stands for when the choice is not easy, the answer is not obvious, and money is on the line.
The paper notes that values-based concerns now influence a broad range of business decisions, from product design and sourcing to employment policies and public positioning. It also emphasizes that employees, customers, governments, and shareholders all communicate their values and preferences in different ways, and that management must stay attuned to those preferences, as misalignment can carry real economic consequences. That is precisely the language of risk management.
A Governance Issue for the Board
For boards, this means values cannot be siloed in human resources, investor relations, or communications. Values belong in governance. Boards need to ask not only what the company says its values are, but how those values are translated into operations, incentives, escalation, and response. If culture is a control, then values are part of the control environment.
This is also why corporate values should be viewed as a business risk issue. A values mismatch can trigger employee walkouts, consumer backlash, shareholder agitation, government retaliation, or a reputational spiral amplified through social media. The paper offers multiple examples showing how value-related decisions can carry material economic consequences. For the modern board, that means values are no longer a side conversation. They are part of enterprise risk management.
The paper offers another insight that compliance professionals should take seriously. Management often lacks perfect information about stakeholder values, and shareholders face structural impediments in communicating their views clearly. The authors argue that shareholder input can help management better understand public sentiment, reputational risk, and the tradeoffs between values and value. Whether one agrees with every detail of their governance analysis, the broader compliance lesson is straightforward: management needs listening mechanisms before a crisis hits.
Compliance as an Information System
That point should resonate deeply with compliance professionals. A mature compliance program is, at its core, an information system. It is supposed to tell management what it needs to know before misconduct metastasizes. The same is true for values-based risk. If the only time leadership learns that employees, customers, or investors believe the company is out of step is when a boycott begins, or a viral post explodes, the company’s information channels have already failed.
What Boards Should Do
- Boards should insist that management identify the company’s most material values-sensitive risk areas. These will vary by industry. For one company, it may be product safety. For another, environmental performance. For another, labor standards, DEI, or political engagement. The important point is that these issues should be mapped as risk categories, not simply discussed as messaging challenges.
- Boards should ask whether the company has credible mechanisms to hear from stakeholders before controversy becomes a crisis. The paper emphasizes that employees and customers often have clearer channels to express their values and preferences than shareholders do. A compliance-minded board should ask: Are we learning from all of them? Are we capturing concerns through speak-up systems, culture assessments, employee town halls, customer trends, market testing, and investor engagement? Or are we waiting for a public backlash to tell us what we should already know?
- Boards should evaluate whether management is treating corporate culture as a control. This means looking beyond tone at the top to the systems beneath it: incentives, middle-management behavior, escalation pathways, decision rights, and accountability. Values that live only in a code of conduct are decorative. Values that influence promotions, discipline, product choices, third-party oversight, and crisis response become operational.
- Boards should ensure that compliance has a seat at the table when values-laden business decisions are made. The compliance function should not decide corporate values. That is not its role. But it should help management test assumptions, identify blind spots, assess stakeholder reactions, and determine whether a proposed course is consistent with the company’s culture and risk appetite. In that sense, compliance serves as both translator and challenger.
- Boards should resist the temptation to turn every values issue into a political debate. The paper wisely cautions against viewing corporations as moral leaders first and economic institutions second. That is a sound warning. But there is an equal and opposite danger in pretending that values are irrelevant to business. They are not. The board’s job is not to moralize. It is to govern. And governance today requires management to understand how stakeholder values affect long-term value.
Steps for Chief Compliance Officers
For chief compliance officers, there are some clear, practical steps to take.
Begin by incorporating values-sensitive issues into risk assessment and culture reviews. Build a process to identify where stakeholder expectations may materially affect the company’s operations, reputation, and control environment. Make sure that speak-up and escalation systems can capture values-based concerns, not only legal violations. Work with management to develop an early-warning capability around stakeholder sentiment. Bring boards concrete reporting on culture trends, employee concerns, reputational flashpoints, and areas where the company may be drifting away from its stated values. Finally, pressure-test whether the company’s incentives, communications, and business decisions align with the culture it claims to have.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is this: corporate values are not soft. They are not ornamental. They are not outside the compliance function’s field of vision. They are part of how companies create value, lose trust, and invite risk. The real challenge for boards and CCOs is not to choose values in the abstract. It is to build the governance and information systems that help management understand stakeholder values before a crisis hits. That is not politics. That is good governance.
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