Strategy is Standards

Among the most important things I've learned is that to succeed, a professional firm needs values, principles, or standards. But you have to use these words very carefully. In many firms, their values are things they aspire to -- things they wish to be -- and that is not the sense in which I am using it here. I'm using the values in almost the religious sense, that these are the principles we will not be prepared to break. What I am trying to report to you is, firms that have such principles, flourish.