The 5 Universal Values That Govern Our World
Your customer can’t be “Everyone”. We hear this all the time from business lectures and startup books. According to traditional startup theory, you have to pick a niche, define it, and create an unrealistic avatar with alliterative names for it like Mandy the Manager and Eric the Executive. These two “people” supposedly have very different views of the world and these somehow become apparent only when we look at their buying behavior.
Whether you agree with this notion of extreme targeting or you have a more broad sense of customer segmenting, the truth remains that, as a population, the people of this world do have different values and these do generally tend to depend on how much money a person makes, their level of education, if they have children, and where they live.
But what if there were such things as “Universal Values” that everyone shared? No matter which country they come from, which race, religion, or socioeconomic or demographic background they represented, everyone shared these values.
It turns out, this is more than a thought experiment.
Universal Shared Values
In 1995 a professor named Rushworth M. Kidder wrote about this situation in a book that was called “Universal Human Values: Finding an Ethical Common Ground” (the name has since…
