Declaring what you value is a deceptively easy thing to do. However, what you’re actually doing is far more consequential than it seems.
You’re committing to an ongoing identity and course of action. You’re describing how you will relate to others—including those you haven’t met. You’re establishing a criterion by which you will be judged, not just by your contemporaries, but by history.

Many companies, governments and other institutions take this step with confident boldness. But not all do so with deep seriousness. And even fewer will survive long enough to have their values tested—and validated—through decades, or centuries, of change.

For IBMers, it is precisely because we have survived for nearly a century, and expect to thrive for another one—and because we face so many truly challenging questions right now—that our values are, once again, so essential.

How will we make the tough calls? For example, are there profit opportunities we ought not to pursue?

This is a question, in part, of attending to what’s ethical and in tune with our values. But it’s also about being honest about what we can actually achieve.

Conversely, what are the truly important public issues that we must pursue, even when it means extra cost and effort, even when it may mean sacrificing business? In an earlier era, IBM demonstrated this kind of principled behavior in matters of diversity and tolerance, when Tom Watson, Jr.—bringing the company values established by his father into a new era—wrote to the governors of some southern U.S. states about IBM’s refusal to adhere to “separate but equal” laws, and took the additional step of codifying IBM’s equal opportunity policy.

Setting out to base any institution on values comes down to two things: a clear idea of who you are, and the confidence that that is the right thing to be. It’s accepting a life based on continual re-evaluation and difficult but meaningful decisions. Which is, of course, the place where the important discoveries are made, and where the future is shaped.

In other words,A place inhabited by IBMers.