Company manifesto examples are easier to admire than to learn from, because most collections reprint the text and stop there. What follows is a curated set with what each one is doing, why it works, and a link to read the original in full.
A company manifesto is a declaration of conviction resting on an organisation’s values, purpose and missions. It presents a set of ideas and, in the corporate case that interests us here, it can also set out a plan of action and a commitment.
Commitment to customers, to the environment, to stakeholders, to the ecosystem and, obviously, to the people who work there. The good ones read like a position taken. The weak ones read like a values poster with longer sentences.
| The cliche | The reality | The mirror |
|---|---|---|
| Company manifesto examplesA manifesto is treated as a longer, more emotional version of a values statement, written by communications and signed off by the executive. It is published, admired for a fortnight and then never referenced again. | The good ones commit to something costlyEvery manifesto in this collection that has survived contains at least one commitment that costs the organisation money, closes a commercial option or invites criticism. That cost is what separates a manifesto from a brochure. | Read them for what they refuseStudying these examples for their language misses the point. Read them for what each organisation has agreed never to do, because that clause is the only part a competitor cannot copy without consequence. |
When a company manifesto is worth writing
A manifesto marks the adoption of a new vision, approach, programme or practice. It criticises a current state of affairs and proclaims a new movement or a new era, which means it can carry a sharp social critique and an inspiring inaugural declaration at the same time.
What it does that a values statement cannot
A manifesto asserts convictions and details how customers, colleagues and the environment are regarded. It gathers the rules of the game and the commitments that guide what leaders, managers and staff do daily.
The text is written to provoke strong emotion for three reasons: to make candidates want to join, to engage the people already there in investing their effort, and to give customers early evidence that the organisation holds firm convictions.
Eight situations where one earns its place
A manifesto suits specific moments rather than every moment. These eight cover most of the cases where writing one produces something people actually use.
- Launching a business, where the manifesto becomes a founding document that feeds the employer offer and recruitment.
- Changing direction, to announce a shift in strategy, culture or priorities clearly enough to mobilise a team around it.
- Aligning teams on a shared vision and a set of shared values, and giving them a reference to come back to.
- Committing to stakeholders, showing customers and partners where the organisation stands on quality, social responsibility or environmental impact.
- Managing change, reassuring people during a transition that the fundamentals still hold.
- External communication, in marketing or public relations, to show a commitment to particular values or practices.
- Induction and training, introducing new starters to the culture and to what is expected of them.
- Strengthening internal cohesion, by uniting people around something they can recognise themselves in.
Australian manifestos worth studying
Australia has produced three manifesto-style commitments that hold up against anything overseas, and all three share a feature worth noticing. Each one puts a number on the commitment, which removes the option of quietly reinterpreting it later.
Who Gives A Crap
The Melbourne company built its entire proposition on one sentence, promising to donate half its profits so everyone has access to clean water and a toilet. The founder proved the model by sitting on a toilet in a warehouse for fifty hours, streaming it, until strangers had pledged fifty thousand dollars.
What makes this a manifesto rather than a marketing line is the arithmetic. Fifty per cent is auditable, it constrains every pricing decision the business makes, and it cannot be softened in a bad year without somebody noticing.
The tonal choice matters as much. The company leads with delight and lets the purpose close the argument, rather than opening with the mission and hoping the product catches up.
Canva and the Two-Step Plan
Canva’s manifesto is two sentences long. Step one is to build one of the world’s most valuable companies, and step two is to do the most good they can with it, which the company sets out in full on its Step Two page.
The structure is the clever part. Most purpose statements ask you to believe that commercial success and doing good are the same activity. This one admits they are two different activities and states the order.
It also carries a cost. Canva joined Pledge 1% in 2019 committing time, profit, product and equity, then committed a further 30 per cent of the company. Those are numbers a board has to live with.
Atlassian’s values
Atlassian’s five values function as a manifesto because of how they are written rather than what they say. Open company, no bullshit. Don’t do the wrong thing by the customer, phrased considerably less politely on their own site. Play as a team. Build with heart and balance. Be the change you seek.
The language does the work. A value written in the vocabulary people actually use gets quoted back at leadership in meetings, and a value written in corporate register never does.
Worth studying alongside their ShipIt ritual, since values and rituals hold each other up. I unpack that relationship in my piece on the four bases of innovation DNA.
Purpose and activism manifestos
These four were written to change something outside the organisation, which gives them a different rhythm. They read as declarations rather than descriptions, and all four are worth reading in full at the source.
Acumen
Acumen invests what it calls patient capital to close the gap between the efficiency and scale of market-based approaches and the social impact of pure philanthropy. Its vision is a world where everyone has the chance to live with dignity.
The manifesto works by starting with a physical position rather than an aspiration: standing alongside the poor, listening to voices that go unheard, and seeing potential where others see despair.
Its most useful phrase for any organisation is moral imagination, which it defines as the humility to see the world as it is and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be. That is a decent test for any strategy document.
Fashion Revolution
Founded after the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013, Fashion Revolution has become the largest fashion activism movement in the world, mobilising citizens, brands and policymakers through research, education and advocacy.
Its manifesto runs to ten clauses, each beginning with the word fashion and each describing a condition that does not currently exist. Dignified work, fair and equal pay, a voice for workers, respect for craft, transparency, and an industry that never destroys or discards unnecessarily.
The rhetorical device is worth stealing. Writing every clause in the present tense about a future state forces the reader to notice the distance between the sentence and the world.
Possible and its culture code
Possible is a non-profit delivering healthcare in rural Nepal to a community of more than 260,000 people, largely without electricity, clean water or roads. Its team has been told hundreds of times that the work is impossible.
Their culture code for impact sets out eleven principles, and two of them are unusually hard. They treat efficiency as a moral obligation, on the grounds that when your output is impact, wasted time is wasted lives. And they commit to being transparent until it hurts, publishing impact data, finances and failures.
The principle I quote most often in workshops is their instruction to be professionally uncompromising and personally supportive, which resolves a tension most leadership teams pretend does not exist.
LiisBeth
LiisBeth is a feminist, trans-inclusive, non-profit media company led by women, based in Toronto on the traditional lands of the Wendat, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinabek and the Mississaugas.
It publishes an open-access monthly digital magazine and a newsletter for women entrepreneurs, creators, innovators and leaders working towards a liberated, equitable and inclusive economy, and it runs a membership community alongside an entrepreneurial forum.
Unsurprisingly, their manifesto is a feminist manifesto, and it is the clearest example in this collection of a document that would repel a portion of its potential audience on purpose. That is a design decision rather than an accident.
Employer brand and culture manifestos
These five are addressed inward, to the people who already work there and the ones being recruited. They are the hardest category to write well, because the audience can check every claim against their own Tuesday.
Atomic DNA
This British employer brand and HR communications agency has produced one of the most striking people-focused manifestos I know, built around a single provocation: forget the word employee and think ambassador.
It runs to eight principles addressed to an HR leader, and the sequence is unusually honest. Measure twice, cut once, comes first, on the argument that measuring your impact is worth almost as much effort as the activity itself. Engagement is treated as a process rather than an outcome.
My favourite is the sixth, which observes that you cannot read the label from inside the jar. It is an argument for HR spending time outside HR, and it is the principle most likely to be ignored.
The Agile HR manifesto
This one belongs to a collective rather than a company. In 2015, twenty-seven consultants, authors and academics working across HR and agility produced a short manifesto modelled directly on the original Agile manifesto for software.
It states six preferences, each opposing a familiar practice: collaborative networks over hierarchical structures, transparency over secrecy, adaptability over prescription, inspiration and engagement over management and retention, intrinsic motivation over extrinsic reward, and ambition over obligation.
Six principles follow, covering engagement, adaptation to change, self-organising team networks, motivation, trust and personal development. The form is borrowed and the discipline of choosing between two goods rather than listing them both is what makes it useful.
Skimlinks
Skimlinks built its culture around an idea it calls Skimlove, capturing the level of care it puts into helping customers, looking after teammates and making the work enjoyable. The founder asked the lead designer to illustrate the values, and the resulting culture book was later published openly.
Four commitments carry it: aim for better, embrace change, move the needle, and respect each other. The second one contains the sentence I find most transferable, that their legitimacy comes from asking the right question rather than from knowing everything.
The fourth commitment includes a rule worth adopting: never leave a room silently disagreeing.
Mindvalley
Mindvalley’s manifesto is the longest in this collection and the most polarising. Headquartered in Kuala Lumpur with passports from more than fifty countries in one building, it describes itself as an Earth company rather than an American or Malaysian one.
It commits to transforming its people into the best version of themselves, extending explicitly to their physical health, their meditation practice and their spiritual growth. It divides organisations into humanity-plus and humanity-minus, and states which kind it intends to be.
Read it as the outer limit of the form. A manifesto this expansive attracts people who want their employer involved in their whole life, and repels everybody else, which is presumably the intent.
frog design
The frog manifesto, now part of Capgemini Invent, is as unique and as constantly evolving as the studio itself. The text was written more than twenty years ago by the late Steven Skov Holt, a close collaborator of founder Hartmut Esslinger.
What makes it distinctive is the format. The visual language changes from studio to studio, each version capturing the character of that particular office, so the same words appear as a different mural in every location.
That is a design solution to a real problem. A single fixed artefact belongs to head office, and a rewritten one belongs to whoever made it.
Field note
The manifesto that could not survive a single question
A leadership team asked me to facilitate the writing of their manifesto. They had done the preparation properly, with workshops across three sites and a draft that read well. My only contribution to the first session was one question: which of these sentences would cost us something to keep?
The room went through the draft line by line and could not find one. Every clause described something they were already doing, or something nobody could disagree with. The most committal sentence in the document promised to listen to their people.
They rewrote it around three commitments that had a price attached, including one that closed off a category of client work they had been taking for years. The finance director argued against that clause for an hour, which is how everybody knew it was the right one.
Test every line of a draft manifesto against one question: what does this cost us if we keep it? A sentence with no cost is a sentence a competitor can copy tomorrow, and your own people already know the difference.
Brand and product manifestos
The last group speaks outward to customers, and the best of them commit to something a customer can verify. The weakest describe a feeling.
Holstee
The Holstee manifesto is probably the best known company manifesto in the world, to the point that the company abandoned the product it was founded on, pocket T-shirts, to sell cards, posters and notebooks derived from the text instead.
Written in 2009 by the three founders while the business was still an idea, it was set as a typographic poster by designer Rachael Beresh. The Washington Post later described it as the new Just Do It.
It is worth studying for one structural reason. Almost every line is an instruction addressed to the reader rather than a statement about the company, which is why people put it on their wall.
Nike, twice
Nike offers two manifestos separated by decades, and the contrast teaches more than either one alone. The earlier text, dated to 1977 and of uncertain provenance, is aggressively commercial: our business is change, we are on offense always, perfect results count more than perfect process.
It names its own dangers explicitly, listing bureaucracy, personal ambition, energy takers over energy givers, and having too many things in the balance. Very few organisations publish their own failure modes.
The later running division manifesto does the opposite. It is a list of things the writers love and believe about running, ending on the line that there is no finish line, and it never mentions a product.
Read the two together and you can see a company deciding to stop talking about itself. Nike now communicates through its purpose and values rather than through either text.
Chipotle
Chipotle’s manifesto rests on a claim about causation: that there is a link between how food is grown and prepared and how it tastes. Real is better, and it is the harder way to do things.
The commitments underneath are checkable, which is the whole point. A fixed number of ingredients you can pronounce, no artificial flavours, colours or preservatives, no freezers or can openers, responsibly raised meat, and a stated waste diversion target.
Note what that costs them. Every one of those commitments removes a supply chain option that would be cheaper, which is exactly why the document has weight.
The North Face
A statement of faith built around four achievable commitments, with nature positioned at the centre of everything the company does. Circular economy development, responsibly sourced fabrics, supplier partnership on carbon, and sustainable packaging.
The document opens with a fact rather than a value, noting that the equivalent of a garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned every second. Leading with the problem rather than the intention is a deliberate and effective choice.
Each commitment carries a date. Dates are what turn a manifesto into something a journalist can hold you to, and most organisations remove them during legal review.
Superlist
Superlist is the successor project to Wunderlist, the task app Microsoft acquired and retired. Its manifesto is built for teams and made for people, and it opens with an observation about motivation rather than about software.
The argument is that productivity is an indicator of something else, since people work hard to be recognised, to feel accomplishment and to be proud of what they made. Most tools show you an endless list of what you have not done.
Treating productivity as a feeling and designing for that feeling is a product manifesto that actually constrains the product, which is rarer than it sounds.
Beeshake
Beeshake, which builds idea-sharing and collaborative innovation software, did something unusual. Rather than writing a manifesto for itself, it wrote one for the learning organisation, on the argument that legitimacy no longer rests in technical mastery but in the capacity to support people as their skills grow.
The convictions came out of collaborative work and the layout is openly modelled on Holstee. It argues for an organisation that finds the right role for a talent rather than the reverse, and that concentrates on developing strengths rather than correcting weaknesses.
Writing a manifesto for your customers’ situation rather than for your own company is a positioning move worth noting.
Pernod Ricard
Good Times from a Good Place is the manifesto of a group that calls its people créateurs de convivialité, creators of conviviality, and it is the only example here that has to argue against its own product category.
Four commitments carry it: preserving the terroirs its products come from, valuing people through diversity and supplier community, acting circularly on waste, and behaving responsibly by fighting alcohol abuse.
That last commitment is the interesting one. A drinks group committing publicly to reducing misuse of drink is either the most cynical clause in this collection or the most courageous, and which one it is gets settled by the marketing budget rather than by the document.
What separates a manifesto that works from one that does not
Reading twenty of these in one sitting makes the pattern obvious. Three tests separate the documents people quote from the documents people scroll past, and none of the three concerns the writing.
The three tests
Apply these before publishing anything. Each one can be answered in a meeting, and a draft failing all three is a values statement with ambition.
| Test | The question | What failing it means |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Which clause costs us money, closes an option or invites criticism? | Nothing here constrains a future decision, so nothing here will be referenced |
| Refusal | What have we agreed never to do? | A competitor can adopt the whole document tomorrow at no cost |
| Verification | Could an outsider check any of this? | The document describes a feeling rather than a commitment |
Signals that your draft is in trouble
Four signals appear during the drafting rather than after publication, which is when they can still be fixed.
- Nobody in the room argues against any sentence, which means no sentence commits you to anything.
- Legal review removes every date and every number, leaving intentions.
- The document could be published by your closest competitor with only the logo changed.
- It was written by communications and shown to the workforce for comment rather than written with them.
Write yours before you borrow anybody else’s structure
Examples are useful once you know what a manifesto is for. Read my guide to writing a company manifesto and build the document with your people rather than presenting it to them.
How I can help you write yours
I facilitate manifesto and values work with leadership teams and with whole workforces, and the process matters more than the wording. A document written by three people and announced to four hundred will be read once.
Workshops and collaborative drafting
Drafting workshops run across sites and levels, with each group responsible for a section rather than commenting on somebody else’s. The output is a document people recognise their own words in.
The hardest session is always the one where the three tests get applied, because that is where a comfortable draft loses half its sentences.
Keynotes and culture programmes
A keynote suits an organisation that has published values nobody quotes and wants to understand why. These examples do most of the persuading, since the contrast between a costly commitment and a comfortable one is visible in seconds.
Longer work connects the manifesto to what actually happens afterwards, because a document that contradicts the appraisal system loses to the appraisal system every time.
Conclusion: what these company manifesto examples have in common
Every document in this collection that has lasted contains at least one sentence somebody argued against. Fifty per cent of profits. A fixed ingredient count. A date. A category of work refused.
The rest is craft, and craft can be hired. The commitment cannot, which is why the drafting session matters more than the copywriter.
Read these company manifesto examples for what each organisation gave up rather than for what it promised, and your own draft will be shorter and considerably harder to write.
Frequently asked questions about company manifestos
What is the difference between a company manifesto and a values statement?
A values statement lists qualities an organisation admires. A manifesto takes a position, criticises a current state of affairs and commits to a course of action. The practical test is whether any sentence costs the organisation something to keep.
What makes a company manifesto credible?
A commitment somebody outside can verify. Fifty per cent of profits, a fixed ingredient count, a dated target, a category of work refused. Documents built entirely from intentions get read once and never quoted, because nothing in them constrains a future decision.
Who should write a company manifesto?
The people who will have to live with it, across sites and levels, with each group drafting a section rather than commenting on somebody else’s. A manifesto written by communications and presented for comment reads as an announcement, and people treat it accordingly.
Are there good Australian company manifesto examples?
Who Gives A Crap commits half its profits to clean water and sanitation, Canva’s Two-Step Plan separates building a valuable company from doing good with it, and Atlassian’s values work because they are written in the vocabulary people actually use.
