All businesses should have a core set of principles, and policies should follow after that. It’s easy to conflate the two, and it can be dangerous if you do. I recently heard Adam Grant share the story of Robert Reffkin of Compass, and how this kind of overlap between principles and policies caused some problems there. Compass is a real estate brokerage, and Reffkin wanted to set it apart by not paying commission to his staff and just paying a flat salary. Some time down the road, Reffkin had to change the policy and lost a lot of employees because of it.