Operationalizing Core Values: How Eileen Fisher Built an Efficient Product Pipeline
by Alicia Korten
Values Keynote Speaker | Leading Voice on Workplace Culture
During a trip to Eileen Fisher's design studio in New York City, I had the pleasure of speaking with Liz Wisler, VP of Product Development.
As Eileen Fisher is the leader for socially responsible women's clothing, I was excited to learn how they might be using their core values to drive their high-performance workplace culture.
I was not disappointed.
During my visit Liz shared the details of a workplace culture transformation process she'd led to rethink how the design and production teams create Eileen Fisher's clothing. The end result was a workplace culture that was less siloed to more connected across interrelated departments.
It turns out Eileen Fisher had used their core value of connection to rethink how they produce their products.
Operationalizing core values means translating an organization’s stated values into everyday leadership decisions, employee behaviors, and organizational practices. When companies operationalize their values, those values move beyond statements and actively shape leadership, business processes. and the overall workplace culture.
This article presents a real-world example of a company using its core values to transform how work gets done. It is part of a four-part series examining how Eileen Fisher and Mary's Gone Crackers are operationalizing their core values through everyday leadership decisions to build high-performing workplace cultures.
If you are interested in reading further, you can find additional articles on our resources page under "Real World Examples: Core Values in Action"
Alicia Korten
Values Keynote Speaker
Award-Winning Author
Culture keynote speaker Alicia Korten brings her 20 years of experience building high-performance workplace cultures in retail, manufacturing, finance, and wellness to the national stage.
A Fulbright Scholar and architect of the We Culture Framework, she is a sought after speaker for mission-driven leaders in global industries ranging from finance and insurance to energy and healthcare.
What Does It Mean to Operationalize a Value Through Process Design?
I usually hear people talk about core values in relationship to leadership and employee behavior.
However, a sometimes overlooked use for core values is their ability to help guide workflow and systems redesign. When leaders redesign systems around their core values, they create a context in which it becomes easier for staff and leaders to operationalize those values.
When a company truly operationalizes a core value, it does not simply talk about that value. It reexamines how work is structured, how information moves, and how teams interact to build a high-performing workplace culture.
This makes the Eileen Fisher example outlined in this article especially useful.
It's not a story about a process the company had always used. It's a story of transformation.
Leaders took a familiar product development process, looked at it through the lens of their core value of connection, and redesigned their process to bring to life their value.
The result of the initiative?
A simpler, less stressful workflow that gave both design and production teams more execution time to deliver the clothing line for each season.
Framework for Embedding Shared Principles into Business Systems
Stated Principles
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Business Systems Review
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Workflow Redesign
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Streamlined Processes
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Values aren’t realized through behavior alone. They become real when they are embedded into systems, workflows, and everyday processes.
Why Product Development Was Under Pressure
During my visit Liz and I spoke about how the company’s values shape day-to-day operations. She described a product development system that had become difficult for both internal teams and external partners.
Under the old model, the design team and product development team worked in different locations. The creative team was based in New York City, while the product development team was based at headquarters in Irvington, New York. The teams were closely interdependent, but they were not working side by side.
The old process concentrated work into a high-pressure handoff.
In a three-day meeting, the design team would pass all of its design sheets to product development at one time. According to Wisler, that handoff could involve more than 600 styles covering a four-month segment of the line across the company’s three seasons.
That volume created strain immediately.
Product development had to absorb an enormous amount of information at once. Vendors then had to receive the designs, work from the patterns, make patterns where needed, and return samples within a very tight time frame.
How Shared Principles Work Under Pressure
Receive Designs
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Translate into Patterns
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Produce Samples
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Rapid Feedback
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Final Output
(All within tight timelines to maintain speed and coordination)
High-performing workplace cultures execute processes with speed, coordination, and precision under tight timelines.
How Eileen Fisher Transformed the Process
Rather than accepting that pressure as simply part of the business, Eileen Fisher took another look at the process through the lens of one of its core values: Connection. Leaders asked what it would mean to design the workflow in a way that better reflected the relationship between the teams.
In the video below, Wisler explains how Eileen Fisher rethought the process by bringing teams closer together and changing the flow of work.
The Eileen Fisher
Core Principle
The way work flows through an organization impacts its high-performing workplace culture, having a direct impact on speed, quality, and collaboration.
Liz Wisler, VP of Product Development at Eileen Fisher, explains how the company used its core value of connection to redesign the product development process.
The company decided to try a new model in which designs would flow over time rather than being passed all at once.
To make that possible, Eileen Fisher created a product development team that would work directly in the creative center with the design team. Instead of remaining at headquarters in Irvington, members of product development were relocated so they could be physically present, available to designers, and able to receive styles as they were ready to pass.
That shift changed two things at once.
First, it changed physical proximity: teams that had previously worked in separate offices were now in the same space.
Second, it changed the timing of the work: information no longer arrived in one overwhelming surge, but moved through the process in a more continuous flow.
The Connection to Performance Loop
Before
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Teams worked from separate location
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Information arrived in large batches with limited collaboration
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Tight timelines
After
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Teams co-located and connected
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Continuous information flow with strong collaboration
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Faster, more responsive execution
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3-4 weeks added to processing time
Leveraging Principles to Redesign Organizational Workflows
In our conversation, I reflected back to Wisler that the company had looked at its value of connection and realized something simple but significant: two interrelated teams were trying to do highly collaborative work from different locations.
Using connection as a decision lens meant bringing them physically together and seeing what new synergies emerged. She agreed.
The result wasn't cosmetic.
The redesigned process gave the team an additional two to four weeks to process information. That extra time reduced pressure on product development and created a more workable process for vendors as well.
Eileen Fisher used 'connection' to challenge an inherited workflow, redesign how teams interacted, and improve the product development cycle.
High-performing workplace culture thrives when work flows continuously and is enabled by proximity, communication, and
real-time collaboration.
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Values create real impact when they challenge how work is structured,
not just how people behave.
The Infrastructure of Cultural Transformation
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Moving product development staff from headquarters into the creative center so they could work directly with design
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Replacing a three-day mass handoff with a process that flowed over time
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Allowing designers to pass styles when they were ready rather than all at once
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Reducing the burden of processing more than 600 styles in a single compressed transfer
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Giving product development an additional two to four weeks to work through information
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Creating a more manageable process not only for internal teams but also for external vendors
From Batch Processing to Continuous Flow
Before
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3-day mass handoffs
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600+ styles processed at once
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High pressure with bottlenecks
After
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Continuous workflow
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Work shared when ready
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Reduced pressure and improved efficiency
Key Takeaways: Operationalizing Culture for Strategic Success
The leadership lesson here is not simply that collaboration matters. It is that values can reveal design flaws in everyday operations. When leaders use shared principles as a practical lens, they identify hidden friction in workflows, relationships, and timing.
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A value can be operationalized, not only through behaviors and language, but through process redesign
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Physical distance between interdependent teams can undermine connection even when collaboration is required
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Changing the flow of information can be as important as changing the people involved
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A values-based transformation can improve the experience of both internal teams and outside partners
Seamless Execution
Operational excellence came from redesigning structure, workflow and collaboration — not just improving individual tasks.
Translating Shared Principles into Performance: The Values Keynote
As a workplace culture and values keynote speaker, Alicia Korten draws on client experiences and engaging audience participation to build unity.
Her workplace culture and values keynotes include practical implementation models and inspiring stories for using values to build high-performance workplace culture.
About Alicia Korten
Alicia Korten is a sought-after workplace culture keynote speaker for mission-driven leaders in global industries ranging from finance and insurance to energy and healthcare.
With over 20 years of experience building high-performance workplace culture in retail, manufacturing, finance, and wellness, she helps mission-driven organizations translate core values into unified culture.
Alicia is the award-winning author of Values Ignite and Values Sustain, guidebooks used by organizations seeking to operationalize core values to drive leadership decisions and everyday work.
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