Operationalizing Core Values in Action: How the Value of Connection Helped Eileen Fisher Transform Product Development
By Alicia Korten
Keynote Speaker on Organizational Culture & Values
Operationalizing core values means translating an organization’s stated values into everyday leadership decisions, employee behaviors, and organizational practices. This is the work leaders focus on when they learn how to operationalize company values across teams, systems, and organizational processes. When companies operationalize their values, those values move beyond statements and actively shape culture, leadership, and business processes.
This article is part of a three-part series examining how Eileen Fisher operationalizes its core values through everyday leadership decisions. It presents a real-world example of how the company used its core value of connection to transform product development.
What Does It Mean to Operationalize a Value Through Process Design?
Organizations often talk about values in terms of culture, leadership, or employee behavior. But values also become visible in systems and workflow. When leaders redesign systems around their values, they begin operationalizing company values in everyday work.
When a company truly operationalizes a value, it does not simply talk about that value. It reexamines how work is structured, how information moves, and how teams interact.
This makes the Eileen Fisher example especially useful. It is not a story about a process the company had always used. It is 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 it.
Why Product Development Was Under Pressure
During my visit to Eileen Fisher’s New York design studio, I spoke with Liz Wisler, Vice President of Product Development, 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 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, Liz Wisler explains how Eileen Fisher rethought the process by bringing teams closer together and changing the flow of work.
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.
How the Value of Connection Changed the Outcome
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 was not 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 did not merely celebrate the value of connection in language. The company used the value to challenge an inherited workflow, redesign how teams interacted, and improve the product development cycle.
Operational Examples of the 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
Leadership Lessons from the Eileen Fisher Example: Key Takeaways
The leadership lesson here is not simply that collaboration matters. It is that values can reveal design flaws in everyday operations. When leaders use a core value as a practical lens, they can 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
How Do These Ideas Appear in a Culture and Values Keynote?
As a speaker on organizational culture and operationalizing company values, Alicia Korten shows leaders how organizations translate company values into systems, workflows, and leadership decisions that shape everyday culture to strengthen collaboration and performance. Her keynotes demonstrates how values-driven leadership turns values into practical operating principles that guide how work gets done across teams.
About the Author
Alicia Korten is a Culture & Values keynote speaker and founder of The Culture Company. She specializes in organizational culture and operationalizing core values and speaks nationally on how organizations translate values into leadership behavior, employee experience, and organizational culture.
Alicia is the author of Values Ignite and Values Sustain, guidebooks used by organizations seeking to operationalize core values so they guide leadership decisions and everyday work.