Business leaders have always learned to juggle the unpredictable. In a world today marked by successive crises — health, geopolitical, climate, economic — resilience is an essential quality. Whatever the size of the company, there are leveraging effects that will promote this resilience. There is one that remains largely underestimated: corporate culture.
Sometimes reduced to a few symbols or values, corporate culture is too often confined to a human resources component. However, it is a strong dimension of the company, a set of values and behaviours capable of driving innovation and growth. When everything is faltering, it is not the tools or processes that will save the company. These are often invisible elements, which do not appear on the company’s balance sheet or in the profit and loss accounts. Corporate culture exists from the moment the entrepreneur starts his or her entrepreneurial adventure surrounded by his or her first employees.
Indeed, in a company where the culture is strong, clear and embodied, employees know how to behave, what matters, and what is expected of them, even when the benchmarks change. This makes it possible to react quickly, to reorganise without chaos, and to remain faithful to the company’s identity without succumbing to organisational panic.
Conversely, a company without a shared culture quickly becomes a field of tension: power games, inertia, strategic misalignment. In a storm, the absence of culture is paid for in cash.
So, is corporate culture a brake on innovation or growth? This is a common mistake, but one that has never been proven! Corporate culture creates a secure framework that enables strategies to be implemented. So many business leaders wonder about the causes of the failure of their strategies: the answer probably lies in the presence or absence of a corporate culture!
Corporate culture is also the remedy to prevent the company from going through difficult times. In other words, there can be no innovation without a strong culture. Companies that innovate sustainably are often those where the culture values curiosity, questioning, cooperation and responsibility. Not those where innovation is confined to an isolated unit or driven by sterile indicators.
We can ask ourselves about the causes of the sharp rise in business failures in our country. The lack of corporate culture could be one of the causes of failure, because when the culture no longer supports the strategy, the company becomes misaligned and takes the risk of becoming stagnant. But a ship that does not move forward moves backwards!
What if corporate culture was simply the conscience of the legal entity? This consciousness capable of perceiving and interpreting events. But this is without counting on the cognitive biases that are increasingly being put forward to warn us about what we think we see when the reality is quite different. Corporate culture is no exception. It is up to the entrepreneur to preserve and maintain this cognitive capital: it is vital for their business!
The world of tomorrow will remain uncertain… that’s for sure! Crises will continue, in other forms. Innovation will remain vital, but difficult to maintain without benchmarks. In this context, corporate culture becomes a factor of strategic robustness. It does not protect against storms: it gives the posture to cross them, and sometimes even to emerge strengthened.
François NAUX is Managing Director of WICS Consulting, independent director, member of APIA and member of the Turgot Club.
Column published in the newspaper Les Echos, 1 December 2025;