Why I turned from company culture to national values.

Why the Culture Code Foundation exists.

I don't build things for the sake of building them. I build things because I believe they create positive value for people. The more, the better.

That conviction has not changed. It is why I started my last company, and it is why, after its exit, I founded the Culture Code Foundation.

Our core purpose is simple: By fostering positive, value-oriented behaviors, we help forge high-performance cultures that thrive on exceptionally engaged employees. Not for shareholder profit. For lasting impact on the people who show up to work every day.

I have seen what happens when a company codifies what it stands for. Decisions get faster. Trust gets deeper. People stop being employees and start being co-owners of something larger than their job description.

That is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between an organization that drifts and one that leads.

Why I stopped thinking only about companies.

A company can have hundreds or thousands of employees. A country has millions of citizens.

If codified values change how a company performs, the same logic applies at a much larger scale. Germany has roughly 5 million public servants and 80 million citizens in total. If shared values sharpen decisions and build trust inside a company, why would that logic stop at the company's front door?

I believe it does.

Germany today is more polarized than at any point in the last decade. In 2011, 38 percent of Germans believed the country was deeply polarized. By 2025, that number had risen to 82 percent. At the same time, 85 percent of Germans say they want a shared set of societal values.

But this is not only a domestic story. Values are also a geostrategic answer. Authoritarian and imperialist powers do not compete on values, they compete on raw power and they exploit the absence of a clear counter-position. A country without a defined values compass has nothing firm to stand on when that pressure arrives. A country with one has a foundation that cannot be bought, coerced, or eroded from outside. That foundation does not just protect Germany. It strengthens democracy itself. At home, and among the allies who look to Germany for direction.

The lack of value is a missing strategic piece, even a vulnerability. Countries without a clear values compass make inconsistent decisions, lose trust, and struggle to project a coherent identity in a competitive world. Companies with the same problem lose customers and talent. Countries lose something bigger: cohesion, credibility, and their pull on the people and capital they need.

What Deutschlandwerte is.

Deutschlandwerte is not only a commission to define values. A commission is a first step in a much longer undertaking.

Deutschlandwerte is a decades-long project. First, it defines Germany's shared values. Not as a moral statement, but as a strategic one: What does Germany stand for in a world of geopolitical competition, and how does that shape decisions when goals conflict, like freedom against security, or growth against sustainability?

Second, it manifests those values. Anchoring them in education, institutions and public life, so they outlast any single legislative term.

Third, and further down the road, it extends the same thinking to a European level. National values are the first step. A coherent set of European values is the next one.

The first concrete milestone is a cross-party values commission. Built on citizen participation, expert work, and public dialogue, tasked with developing a legislative proposal that anchors these values permanently. That is the step we are working towards now, together with partners from politics, business, and civil society.

Laws set the boundaries. Values set the direction. Germany has plenty of the former. It is time we became equally deliberate about the latter.

Find out more on: www.deutschlandwerte.de.