Lean into Values as a Compass for Navigating 2025

In a new CommPRO.biz article, Building a Hierarchy of Values Helps Businesses Navigate Ethical Challenges and Ideological Attacks, I make the case for re-visiting values as a guide for decision-making in 2025.  

“If we focus on values with a small “v”, through the lens of political party, economic class, religion or creed, we are likely to focus on what divides. If we look at big “V” values, we start to think about commonalities and what we share.”

The piece recognizes that the big “V” idea of American or universal values is not without issue. But it makes the case for using them to find the high ground above the current ideological melee.

Re-visiting values that matter to us is a starting point. Developing or building a hierarchy of values provides a framework for decision-making and the ability to respond to the small “v” attacks from activists, political leaders or consumers.

Highlighting examples of companies that have stuck to their values over time, I argue the return on equity of having and sticking to values will be significant.     

“Going through the exercise of developing a hierarchy of values for decision-making provides a path to express differences in views, while making a case for actions that are intellectually sound and defensible.”   

The values of companies and professionals that come out of this process must be authentic to serve as a solid foundation for compelling arguments or bet-the-company decisions.      

Values, ethics and morals are complex but the article concludes with the idea that “without a focus on big "V" values, we are lost at sea”.                  

Simon Erskine Locke is founder & CEO of communications agency and professional search and services platform, CommunicationsMatch™, a CommPRO partner and columnist. He is vice president of the Foreign Press Association, an agency founder, and has held head of communications roles at Morgan Stanley, Prudential Financial and Deutsche Bank. CommunicationsMatch’ s technology helps clients search, shortlist and hire agencies and professionals by industry and communications expertise, location, size, diversity and designations. CommunicationsMatch developed the industry’s first integrated agency search and RFP tools, Agency Select™, with RFP Associates. CommunicationsMatch™ powers PRSA’s Find a Firm agency search tools.