Culture is a Business Health Metric: Reframing Culture as a Strategic Portfolio, Not a Perk
We don’t need another leadership offsite or a feel-good culture deck. We need a better operating model for how we treat culture in the business.
It’s not a perk. It’s not just HR’s problem. And it’s not some squishy, immeasurable thing.
Culture is a business health metric, and one of the most underleveraged strategic assets on the balance sheet.
In Building Better Organizations, Claudy Jules lays out a framework that should be required reading for every business leader today. He categorizes culture not as one uniform force, but as a portfolio of subcultures, each engineered to drive a different kind of business value. When designed intentionally, culture becomes a system that improves strategic clarity, operational resilience, and talent trust.
The Four Cultural Asset Classes That Drive Value
According to Jules’ research, organizations that successfully design for effectiveness tend to build subcultures that fall into one of four categories:
Strategy Enablers: Subcultures that drive innovation and transformation. GE’s digital unit is one example—structured as a separate, agile culture to bring new ideas to life.
Talent Multipliers: Subcultures that build identity, belonging, and retention. BMW’s Project i (focused on electric vehicles) developed a unique, mission-driven subculture that attracted top engineering talent and reflected the company’s broader future vision.
Efficiency Enhancers: Subcultures focused on reducing overhead and improving ROI. Qantas created Jetstar Airways to operate under a leaner, more competitive model in response to low-cost competitors.
Risk Mitigators: Subcultures built to address uncertainty and protect long-term stability. State Street’s creation of Global Exchange, a data and analytics-driven business, is a clear example of proactively managing decision-making risk with a distinct agile culture.
“Every company is a portfolio of assets… Culture is a lever that can be used to augment a company’s strategy and organizational health.”
When culture is structured in this way, it becomes easier to measure. Easier to manage. Easier to fund and evolve like any other strategic capability.
Why Culture Matters More Than Strategy
If culture sounds like a “nice to have,” consider this: Companies with strong, adaptive cultures don’t just outperform, they obliterate their competition. In a seminal 11-year study by John Kotter and James Heskett:
Firms with strong performance cultures increased revenue by 682% (vs. 166% for peers)
Their stock prices grew 901% (vs. 74%)
And net income increased 756% (vs. 1%)
Why? Because culture drives execution. It shapes decision-making speed, cross-functional trust, risk tolerance, and whether people go above and beyond—or just go through the motions.
Or as Peter Drucker famously said (and every strategist has since echoed):
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Organizational Health = Culture × Strategy × Brand
Culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s part of an ecosystem that also includes your strategy (what you’re trying to do) and your brand (what you’re promising to the world).
When those three are aligned, you get what Claudy Jules calls organizational coherence—a state where internal behaviors match external messages and strategic goals. But when they drift apart?
You get confusion, distrust, and churn.
In her book Fusion, Denise Lee Yohn puts it simply:
“Your brand is what you promise to customers; your culture is how you deliver on it.”
Too many companies build brands they can’t deliver on. Marketing says one thing, Glassdoor says another. Your brand is built on innovation, but decisions still need six signatures. You say “people first,” but performance reviews are annual and vague.
This kind of misalignment has internal impacts of low morale sure, but also it’s a straight up business liability. According to MIT Sloan Management Review, toxic culture is now the single biggest predictor of attrition… more than compensation, job insecurity, or even remote flexibility.
Building a Healthy Organization Starts with a Culture Audit
As Jules notes, most organizations already have multiple subcultures, they just haven’t been designed with intent. They emerge out of necessity, silos, or leadership preferences. And left unchecked, they compete with each other instead of reinforcing a shared goal.
That’s why the first step in culture work isn’t rewriting values. It’s diagnosing what’s actually there.
Here’s how you start building your culture portfolio:
Map the dominant subcultures: Where are the strategy enablers? Where are the risk avoiders? Where are behaviors misaligned with your stated values?
Link each subculture to business value: What does each group contribute (or cost)?
Identify brand-culture gaps: What promises are being made externally that your internal systems can’t support?
Codify the culture you want to grow: Through rituals, symbols, decision norms, and system redesign. A list of core values is not enough.
Because you can’t scale what you haven’t shaped.
The Bottom Line: Culture Is a Leverage Point, Not a Luxury
“The healthiest companies embed culture directly into how the business operates—not as a side initiative, but as a central management system.”
If we truly believe that people are our greatest asset, then culture is the system that unlocks that asset.
It should be resourced like a product team. Measured like a P&L line. And designed with the same rigor as your go-to-market strategy. Let’s recap.
Culture is:
A strategic growth driver
A brand credibility multiplier
A system that delivers on your business promises
And one of the most difficult assets for competitors to replicate
The companies that treat culture like a core asset are already outperforming everyone else.
The question is: Will you design yours, or keep defaulting to chance?
