Executive Summary
For much of the past three decades, corporate values in North America have been dominated by familiar themes such as integrity, customer focus, accountability, teamwork, excellence, and innovation.
These values became foundational elements of corporate culture because they provided organizations with a common language for decision-making, employee engagement, and stakeholder trust.
Yet as organizations face unprecedented disruption driven by artificial intelligence, cybersecurity threats, geopolitical instability, workforce transformation, and societal polarization, a new leadership attribute is emerging with increasing prominence: courage.
While courage remains significantly less common than traditional values such as integrity or respect, evidence suggests it is becoming an increasingly important differentiator among organizations seeking to foster innovation, ethical leadership, psychological safety, and organizational resilience.
Courage has evolved from being viewed as a personal leadership trait to becoming a strategic organizational capability.
Our latest research summary examines the prevalence of courage as an explicit corporate value, identifies notable organizations that have adopted courage within their values frameworks, and explores why courage is becoming increasingly relevant in the age of artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and responsible leadership.
To advance AI effectively and efficiently in global organizations, courage must be one of the driving values to dig deeper, think deeper, and act more decisively.
The foundational investments to get AI right are significant, and we must demonstrate thoughtful AI journey roadmaps with measurable results, adding sustaining value.
This will take far more COURAGE than we fully appreciate at this stage of AI evolution.
Courage Remains Relatively Rare Among Corporate Values
Research examining corporate value statements consistently finds that organizations tend to cluster around a relatively small number of commonly adopted values. Studies of publicly disclosed corporate values have found that integrity, customer commitment, employee commitment, social responsibility, and innovation remain the most frequently occurring themes across public companies.
Academic analysis of New York Stock Exchange-listed companies identified dozens of distinct value categories, but courage did not emerge as one of the dominant value classifications. Instead, organizations tended to emphasize values associated with trust, customers, stakeholders, integrity, and entrepreneurship.
This relative absence suggests that courage remains an uncommon value when compared with the dominant values that characterize most corporate cultures. Based on reviews of publicly available corporate values statements, it is reasonable to estimate that only approximately 3–8 percent of medium and large organizations explicitly identify courage as a named corporate value, although many more organizations incorporate courage-related concepts under alternative labels such as boldness, innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, challenging the status quo, or speaking up.
Estimated Adoption Across Canada and the United States
Because no centralized registry exists for corporate values, any estimate must be directional rather than definitive. Nevertheless, based on the prevalence of publicly disclosed value statements and observed adoption patterns, a reasonable estimate can be developed.
Although these figures are estimates, they suggest that courage remains relatively differentiated compared with more traditional values.
Why Courage Is Emerging as a Strategic Value
Historically, organizations focused on values designed to create stability, consistency, and trust. Today’s business environment, however, increasingly rewards adaptability, innovation, and ethical decision-making under uncertainty.
The emergence of artificial intelligence provides a compelling example. Organizations are now confronted with decisions involving algorithmic bias, workforce displacement, cybersecurity threats, misinformation risks, autonomous systems, and regulatory uncertainty. Addressing these issues requires more than technical competence. It requires leaders willing to challenge assumptions, question prevailing narratives, and make difficult decisions in situations where the correct answer is not always obvious.
As workplace culture specialists increasingly note, courage is fundamentally associated with doing what is right even when it is uncomfortable. Courage involves speaking up, confronting difficult truths, acting ethically under pressure, and pursuing innovation despite uncertainty.
From a strategic perspective, courage is becoming increasingly linked to four organizational capabilities:
In an era characterized by continuous disruption, courage is increasingly being viewed not as a soft leadership attribute but as a core business competency.
Organizations That Explicitly Use Courage as a Corporate Value
While relatively uncommon, several prominent organizations have publicly incorporated courage into their values frameworks.
One of the most widely cited examples is Starbucks. Starbucks explicitly states that it seeks to foster a culture of “acting with courage, challenging the status quo and finding new ways to grow our company and each other.” Courage is positioned alongside belonging, transparency, respect, accountability, and performance as a core component of the company’s values system.
Another notable example is ST Engineering North America, which identifies courage as one of five foundational corporate values alongside integrity, value creation, commitment, and compassion. The organization describes courage as a principle that helps guide decision-making and conduct within increasingly complex business environments.
Canadian telecommunications leaders such as SaskTel and TELUS have also embedded courage into their cultural narratives, reflecting the growing importance of courageous leadership in highly disruptive industries.
The Courage Gap: Why Courage Matters More Than Ever
A world-renowned leadership scholar, Dr. Margie Warrell, in her latest book, The Courage Gap: Five Steps to Braver Action, has advanced a compelling body of research arguing that the greatest obstacle facing individuals and organizations is often not capability, intelligence, or resources, but the gap between knowing what must be done and taking the action required to do it effectively.
Warrell argues that the greatest obstacle to leadership effectiveness is often not a lack of knowledge or capability, but what she calls the “courage gap”—the space between what people know they should do and what they actually do. Fear creates this gap; courage closes it by choosing action over avoidance.
A growing number of technology firms, healthcare organizations, and innovation-focused enterprises have also begun incorporating courage-related language into leadership frameworks, although many stop short of naming courage as a formal corporate value. Instead, they emphasize concepts such as fearless innovation, challenging assumptions, entrepreneurial thinking, experimentation, and psychological safety.
The distinction is important because organizations that explicitly identify courage as a value are making a stronger cultural statement. They are signaling that employees are expected not merely to comply with processes, but to exercise judgment, raise concerns, challenge convention, and contribute to organizational learning.
Courage and the Future of AI Leadership
Perhaps nowhere is the value of courage becoming more relevant than in the governance of artificial intelligence.
Boards and executive teams are increasingly being asked to balance innovation with responsibility, growth with governance, and technological advancement with human-centered outcomes.
The leaders who succeed will likely be those willing to ask difficult questions:
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Will this technology create unintended harm?
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Are our governance controls sufficient?
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Have we adequately addressed bias and fairness?
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Are we moving too quickly or too slowly?
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Do employees feel safe raising concerns?
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Are we investing in the right AI use cases?
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Do we have sufficient change management and work redesign expertise to shift versus overlay on existing processes?
These questions require courage because they often challenge prevailing assumptions, investment priorities, and organizational momentum.
As AI adoption accelerates, courage may become one of the defining leadership competencies of the next decade. Organizations that cultivate courageous cultures are likely to be better positioned to identify emerging risks, encourage innovation, respond to disruption, and maintain stakeholder trust.
Strategic Implications for Organizations
For companies, particularly those operating in highly regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, and artificial intelligence, courage presents an opportunity to differentiate corporate culture.
While integrity remains essential, it largely governs how organizations behave once they know the right course of action. Courage governs whether organizations are willing to pursue that course of action when it is difficult, unpopular, or risky.
This distinction is becoming increasingly important as organizations confront challenges involving responsible AI, cybersecurity resilience, climate adaptation, workforce transformation, and geopolitical uncertainty.
The organizations that thrive in the coming decade may not necessarily be those with the most advanced technologies. Rather, they may be those with cultures capable of exercising courage when difficult decisions must be made.
Conclusion
Corporate values are ultimately signals of organizational identity. They communicate what leaders believe, what behaviors are rewarded, and how decisions should be made under pressure.
Although courage remains relatively uncommon as an explicit corporate value across North America, its strategic importance appears to be increasing. The forces reshaping modern business—including artificial intelligence, digital transformation, workforce disruption, and heightened stakeholder expectations—are creating environments in which courage is no longer merely a personal virtue. It is becoming an organizational capability.
For boards, executives, and business leaders, the question is no longer whether courage matters. The more important question is whether organizational cultures are intentionally cultivating it.
The companies that do so successfully may discover that courage becomes the bridge between innovation and responsibility, between ambition and trust, and ultimately between short-term performance and long-term resilience.
Learn More
To learn more about AI, we just released our new book, May 2026, The AI Precipice: An Executive Guide to Balancing Innovation and Safety. It can be ordered here. A 30% discount is available until July 15, 2026. The code is AIPREC26. It is a must-read for board directors and senior executives and has been reviewed by leading experts.
To Get AI Right – Courage will be a crucial core value and is increasingly an organizational capability to thrive. To see some of our book’s research best practices, go here.
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