If you're a CEO, three of the biggest pain points you face in today's business world are: Making the best decisions when the answer isn't always clear - Maintaining a strong and consistent culture as your business rapidly grows - Attracting and retaining the best talent who are a strong culture fit  These problem areas lead to inconsistency, growing pains, and major roadblocks on how to take your organization to the next level. Thankfully, there's a simple solution: Discover, build, and create your core value driven organization. In The Core Value Equation ,  Darius Mirshahzadeh  shows how core values create the ultimate decision-making engine for your organization that consistently produces spectacular results. Core values also create an "invisible manager" that sits next to every employee and holds them accountable to a common set of beliefs, actions, and outcomes, all without hiring a single person. Finally, core values are the best tool out there to recruit and support an army of diehard team members who speak the same language, create consistent results, and make your organization a magnet for like-minded individuals. "The Core Value Equation is a step-by-step guide that all startups, founders, and CEO's should read if they wan to have their teams speaking the same language and build a thriving company culture." --Tony Hsieh, NY Times bestselling author of Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos.com "Darius Mirshahzadeh wrote a book that truly matters. His take on core values and how you make them come to life is a new, refreshing approach to an area of business that is typically severely underleveraged in most companies."-- Chip Conley , New York Times bestselling author and Strategic Advisor of the Airbnb Founders "Core values are the foundation of every great company. They define your culture. Mirshahzadeh has taken a thought-provoking, impressive deep dive into this vital topic. Well done!" -- Gino Wickman , author of Traction and creator of EOS "The Core Value Equation is the most powerful tool your business can leverage."- - Mike Michalowicz , Author of Profit First and Fix This Next "Darius Mirshahzadeh's book, The Core Value Equation will become a must read for every company & leader who wants to finally build a company to create impact. His deep understanding of core values and making them something more than just an asset used by the HR and culture team will change everything" -- Cameron Herold , Founder COO Alliance, Author of Meetings Suck & Vivid Vision "The Core Value Equation is a new look on core values and just how far you can leverage this powerful tool in your organization when designed, implemented and brought to life in a thoughtful and intentional way." -- Jay Goldman , NY Times Best Selling Author of the Decoded Company "As a serial entrepreneur, investor and now CEO coach, I discovered the power of core values 20 years ago. Since then I have used this powerful tool to build dozens of businesses, outperforming the market by 3-5x profitability in each. The challenge has always been the lack of a clear process to discover, develop and make alive these values. Darius has broken the code on what to do with core values to bring them to life in your organization. His design, roll out, implementation and measurement process is spot on. Two thumbs up!" --Richard Manders, Co-Founder of Freescale Coaching Systems and Best Selling Author of The Laughing Rabbit Kirkus Book Reviews A CEO examines the importance of organizational core values. This book tackles a topic that arguably addresses the most vital issue facing CEOs: how to inculcate their organizations with meaningful core values. In a firsthand account, Mirshahzadeh, a CEO who started several successful, high-growth companies, exhibits considerable mea culpa at the outset of his journey, asserting in the introduction: "I hate this company. I can't believe I created this." This sobering admission in 2007 led the author to pursue the art and science of creating and implementing worthwhile corporate core values. The book is organized in two parts, the first of which tears down mistaken notions about core values in order to build them up again in Part 2. In Part 1, Mirshahzadeh explores his own failure to develop appropriate core values for his company, his recognition that these values consist of critical elements, and his realization that they "must be authentic from top to bottom in the organization." He introduces an equation that anchors the remainder of the volume: "CORE VALUES = DECISIONS = ACTIONS = RESULTS." He also puts forth an intriguing notion--that if the equation is properly followed, core values effectively function as "the most powerful invisible manager in the world." Part 2 is a comprehensive manual for how to build, refine, and fully implement core values in a company. The author first painstakingly dissects the steps involved in designing core values, citing examples from his own experien