I hate to be cynical, but I somehow feel a duty to help (seemingly enlightened) people like you, so... "The way to get to your core principles is to ask yoursel

I hate to be cynical, but I somehow feel a duty to help (seemingly enlightened) people like you, so... "The way to get to your core principles is to ask yourself what aspects of your company are so critical to its integrity that you would rather shut down the company than break those principles." How would anyone know the quality of the principles obtained through such a rationale - that those principles aren't far-fetched, or don't impose unnecessary hurdles that may hurt the company and everyone in it, or are too unsubstantiated to mean anything, and so on? On the individual level such principles have at least the animal nature to start with - survive (which is not a choice) and replicate, and pretty much everything we do will contribute in some way or another to those two. But how can one come up with similar a reason for a company, the existence of which is in itself optional to start with? For companies I haven't found yet any hard principles (other than companies being a form of group effort to address in the end the same individual survival and replication, which as a goal isn't that often reflected in the actual organizational behavior).