I have run a business through Y2K, the dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and Covid. I am running one through whatever 2026 turns out to be.
What I have learned through every one of those is that people are not actually afraid of the dark. They are afraid of what is in the dark that they do not know.
In every one of those seasons, the leaders who held it together were not the ones with the best strategy. They did not have a better forecast or a better dashboard. They had a clearer sense of what they would and would not do, regardless of what the next news cycle handed them. They had a cornerstone.
A strategy tells you what to do this quarter. A cornerstone tells you who you are when the strategy stops working.
The first stone goes down first
When a stonemason starts a building, the cornerstone goes down first. Every other stone gets aligned to it. If you set the cornerstone wrong, the whole building leans, and you do not find out until you are three floors up and trying to figure out why nothing fits.
Most owners only think about their values when something has already gone wrong. The bad client. The bad hire. The decision they made at midnight that they could not defend by Monday morning. Then they pull a notebook out and try to write down what they should have done. That is not a cornerstone. That is a regret.
The reason to write down your values now, before 2026 picks up speed, is that values are how you make fast decisions in dark rooms. And 2026 is going to have a lot of dark rooms. The pace of change in AI alone is enough to make every leader I know feel like they are reading the news with one eye and trying to run a business with the other. You cannot strategize your way through that. You can only stand on something underneath it.
Here is the line I keep coming back to. Values are who we say we are. Culture is the attitudes and behaviors that prove it.
If I write "we put people first" on the wall and then I run the team into the ground every fourth quarter to hit a number, I have not put people first. I have put a sentence on the wall and a different value into practice. The team can read both. They are not confused about which one is real.
Joe Lovette and the poster on the wall
Years ago I sat through a session at an EntreLeadership event led by a man named Joe Lovette. Joe was talking about his values, and the value he kept coming back to was Family. Not as a slogan. As a verb. He talked about how he showed up to his kids' games. How he held his calendar. How he made sure the people on his team could go home for dinner without checking their phones.
What got me was that everything he said about his business decisions was tied back to that one word. The hire he made because the candidate's family situation needed it. The client he passed on because the work would have eaten him alive at home. The off-site he canceled because his daughter had a recital.
Family was not a poster. Family was the cornerstone. Every other stone in the building got aligned to it.
I was in my late twenties at that point. I was running an agency, married a few years, no kids yet. I remember thinking, that is the kind of leader I want to be. Not the kind whose values are aspirational and theoretical. The kind whose values are the reason a particular Tuesday went the way it did.
Twenty-some years later, that talk is still in my head. Joe is the reason I sit down with Claire every January with a whiteboard and color-coded blocks for our year. Family blocks first. Business blocks second. Everything else fits in the gaps. Not the other way around.
The four dark rooms I have walked through
Here is what each of the dark rooms taught me, briefly.
Y2K taught me that fear is much faster than data. The whole industry spent two years preparing for a problem that, for most companies, was a non-event. The leaders who panicked early made bad decisions early. The ones who held a steady cornerstone made better calls.
The dot-com bust taught me that being right about the long term and being early about the short term will both kill your business. Plenty of the dot-com casualties had real ideas that came back ten years later under different names. They just did not have a cornerstone underneath the strategy that could carry them through the gap.
2008 taught me that cash on hand is not just a number on a balance sheet. It is a signal of how seriously you took stewardship in the years when nobody was forcing you to. The companies that had been wisely stewarded had options in 2008. The ones that had been extracting did not.
Covid taught me that human relationships are infrastructure. Not a soft skill. Infrastructure. The clients who kept paying us through 2020 were the ones who knew us as humans, not as a vendor on an invoice. The team members who held it together were the ones who knew the rest of the team well enough to actually carry each other.
Every one of those lessons is a cornerstone, not a strategy. Strategies were useless in those moments. The cornerstones are what we built the recovery on.
action
1. Write three to five values down this week. Not for the wall. For your decision-making. 2. Define each one in plain language, with one example of practice and one of violation. 3. Hand the list to someone who has worked closely with you for a year. 4. Ask them, with full honesty, where the words and behavior don't match. 5. Either change the behavior or rewrite the value. Do not lower the bar quietly.
That is what humbly confident leadership looks like in a year of dark rooms. You do not pretend to know the future. You do know who you are going to be when it shows up.
What is your cornerstone? If you cannot answer in one sentence, that is your work this week.
