Recently I had the opportunity to dine with Ken Majer who has been doing outstanding work in the area of values and their effect on companies. He makes a great case that the corporate values should be established before the vision, and mission of a company as misalignment of values will inadvertently cause the strategies to fail during execution. From a company growth perspective, companies in start-up mode typically involve only a handful of people. It will also be likely that each of these people will hold in common a value set, and be passionate about these values. Everyone in these companies will typically wear many hats and quite often cover for each other. In a small company, if these people did not share the same values they likely could not coexist. Likewise, if they did not share a passion for what they were doing they would likely not be in a start-up.