Culture – the organisational superpower

A white paper in our series on the power of culture

Culture is an under researched, under measured and widely under rated change lever that’s empowering leadership for change and increasing differentiation across our industry. While cultural norms differ across segments of the industry, it’s apparent from our research that true innovation in the investment industry is rare. This is at a time when the need to be adaptable, particularly around sustainability and climate change, couldn’t be higher.

Leaders are discovering that not only is culture a key superpower for keeping the organisation on track, but it is the superglue to prevent it from coming unstuck.

This white paper captures finding from the latest Power of Culture (TPOC) study and is focused on the asset owner model (with reference to mainstream and alternatives asset managers) as well as the areas of purpose, sustainability, superteams and change.

If you’re time challenged, we would draw your attention to chapter 2 (the high-level findings from our study) and to CAIA’s contribution to this project and white paper (on page 6).

Asset managers appear more committed to developing their culture and are more confident with it, though we believe this can border on over-confidence. They have particularly strong client-centric scores, while asset owners seem stronger on purpose.

Chapter 2: When aggregating dashboard scores, asset managers on average scored one notch higher than asset owners in cultural attributes and edges.

Figure 1 – Aggregate asset manager dashboard

Figure 2 – Aggregate asset owner dashboard

The remaining sections cover the asset owner culture model (chapter 3), sustainability and purpose (chapter 4), innovation and managing change (chapter 5) and Superteams (chapter 6). The conclusions are in chapter 7.

Chapter 6: How to become a Superteam

To build exceptional performance:

To increase engagement in meetings:

Ten tough questions of Superteams