It's a road map. In the new environment, with speed to market timetables of eighteen months instead of five years, plans become obsolete fast. Principles are not practices. Practices are specific activities or actions that work in one circumstance but not necessarily in another. If you focus on principles, you empower everyone who understands those principles to act without constant monitoring, evaluating, correcting or controlling.
Principles have universal application.
And when these are internalized into habits, they empower people to create a wide variety of practices to deal with different situations. Leading by principles, as opposed to practices, requires a different kind of training, perhaps even more training, but the payoff is more expertise, creativity, and shared responsibility at all levels of the organization. Before people will consistently act on the principle of customer service, they need to adopt a new mindset. With moral compassing, we can beat Japan. The highest leadership principle is win-win interdependency, where you are both high on individual and high on team.