Culture and leadership principles vary widely across great companies. Some publish a tight set of memorable values; others go deep with a long enumerated list. Below is a working set of references I keep coming back to. I’ll add my own commentary on what I think each gets right (and where I’d push back) over time.
Companies
Amazon — Leadership Principles Amazon’s Leadership Principles are the most influential company values ever written — nearly every tech company I’ve worked at or with has borrowed from them, whether they admit it or not. “Customer Obsession,” “Dive Deep,” and “Disagree and Commit” are the three I return to most. Customer Obsession gives teams a north star that cuts through internal politics; Dive Deep is a commitment to rigor that prevents the comfortable distance executives can put between themselves and reality; and Disagree and Commit is the most practical conflict-resolution tool I’ve ever encountered — it gives everyone permission to fight hard and then fully commit to whatever’s decided. My pushback: sixteen is too many, and a long list creates an optimization problem. I’ve watched “Frugality” be used to justify underpaying people and “Are Right, A Lot” be mistaken for license to stop listening. Like any tool, the LPs are only as good as the culture they’re embedded in — they reward the motivated and can be weaponized by the cynical.
dbt Labs — Our Values dbt Labs’ values are unusually honest for a startup — “Values Over Success” is a statement I’ve seen very few companies actually mean, and dbt Labs made a real effort to live it. The knowledge-sharing ethos and transparency are genuine differentiators; the company walks the walk publicly in ways most don’t. My pushback is on length: thirteen values is a list that lives on the wiki, not in anyone’s head. The cultures I’ve seen function best have four or five things people can actually recite at 11pm when making a hard call. That said, if I had to distill this list to its essence, it’s about: do excellent work, be transparent about it, and play the long game.
Grab — Heart, Hunger, Honor, Humility The 4Hs are the most elegant company values I’ve worked under. Four words, each a direct counter to a leadership failure mode: Heart against heartlessness, Hunger against complacency, Honour against ethical drift, Humility against arrogance. What makes them powerful is that they’re genuinely memorable — people actually use them in conversation, which is the real test of any cultural artifact. The challenge with brevity is that it requires interpretation, and interpretation requires ongoing leadership attention. “Hunger” in a hyper-growth environment has a different texture than “Hunger” in a more mature organization. The 4Hs are a starting point for the conversation, not the end of it.
MongoDB — Values MongoDB’s six values are clean and honest — the tightest formulation I worked with during my time as CTO. “Be Intellectually Honest” is the load-bearing one: a set of values that doesn’t require honesty is a marketing exercise. “Build Together” gets at something real too — the best technical outcomes I’ve been part of came from synthesis across disciplines, not from the smartest person in the room. My one push: “Think Big, Go Far” needs a counterweight. Thinking big is only useful coupled with the discipline to start small and prove things out — without that, it can become permission to over-engineer and under-ship.
Sample Leadership Principles from a Leader I Respect — thirteen principles from someone I admire, reproduced in their original framing. These thirteen principles read like a distillation of everything that works — the signal extracted from every leadership principles document I’ve ever read. “Leaders make good decisions quickly” is a principle I wish more organizations had the courage to state plainly: speed is a competitive advantage, and the culture of exhaustive consensus that prevails in many tech companies is risk-avoidance masquerading as rigor. “Leaders engender trust” is my favorite — notably it comes eleventh, after all the operational principles, as a reminder that trust is the substrate everything else runs on. If I were building a team today and could hand new managers one document, this would be it.
See also: Cultural Hints — my own working set of cultural observations.