Steve Newberry Provides Tips to CEOs in Smart Business
December 1, 2008

If you want to be successful as an organization, you need to have a common set of values by which you operate.

“In order to continue to drive growth and maintain innovation, the main thing is that you have to keep everybody on the same page philosophically,” says T.J. Rodgers, founder, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor Corp.

One of the keys to establishing values is to look at what is important to you.

“You have to bring your own core personal philosophies of what you’re doing in a company,” says Steve Newberry, president and CEO of Lam Research Corp. “For better or for worse, the company is going to align to that. ... You basically choose what really is a makeup of who you are as a leader.”

He says to also make sure that those values are ones that others can get excited about, too.

“Choose a set of values that aren’t off the wall,” Newberry says. “... If the values system that you choose, people can relate to and can ultimately make their own, then it doesn’t become the CEO’s culture — it becomes the company’s culture.”