Culture must come front and centre for success in any organisation. Clarity and execution of business culture is paramount, writes David Gilroy.
I used to think that talk of “culture” in companies was a confected piece of business management mumbo jumbo promoted by academics and theorists, or in the pages of management manuals and in MBA courses only. Not real or tangible but imagined. Over time I have come to realise that I was full on wrong about this and that the opposite is true. I am now convinced that getting the culture right in a company is the cornerstone to success. Why does culture matter? In today’s super-fast competitive markets, companies increasingly identify organisational culture as a critical driver of performance, innovation, and long-term sustainability.
Culture, the shared values, beliefs, norms, and practices that shape how people behave and work together influences everything from employee motivation and collaboration to customer satisfaction and financial outcomes. How does culture play in the global grocery sector?
The world’s top five grocery retailers are Walmart ($650 billion annual turnover), Amazon ($580 bn), Costco Wholesale ($250 bn), Schwarz Group, owner of Lidl ($180 bn) and Aldi ($155 bn). The oldest of the five is Schwarz founded in 1930, although the first Lidl store opened relatively recently in 1973. The top two turnover retailers are Walmart, founded in 1962 and Amazon in 1994. They have become global colossuses in short order. Just for context, Sainsbury’s was founded in 1869 and Tesco in 1919. How was this dominance achieved so quickly? Let us look at the differing cultures in the top two in turnover companies.
Walmart’s success is closely tied to a distinct, tightly reinforced organisational culture that emphasises cost discipline, operational excellence, and frontline execution. While the culture has evolved over time, several core elements, many originating with founder Sam Walton, continue to shape how the company operates at massive scale. Consistency is the key. Whether in America or Asia the same cultural maxims apply. Perhaps the most defining aspect of Walmart’s culture is its obsessive focus on cost control. This is not just a financial strategy; it is a cultural norm embedded at every level of the organisation. Frugality is modelled by leadership. Sam Walton famously flew economy, shared hotel rooms, and drove pickup trucks, setting behavioural expectations that persist today. I can attest to this as many of my ex-Asda colleagues, post the Walmart takeover used to marvel at how “tight” cost controls were – and they bought into it. This culture directly supports Walmart’s Everyday Low Price (EDLP) strategy. By minimising internal costs, Walmart consistently offers lower prices than competitors, reinforcing customer trust and loyalty. Walmart prizes operational excellence. Its culture places enormous emphasis on execution, metrics, and process standardisation.
There is a relentless focus on measurement and performance. Store level accountability is prime. Unlike many large corporations where decisions are centralised, Walmart’s culture emphasises local ownership and accountability. Store managers operate with significant responsibility for profit and loss, and success or failure is highly visible through performance metrics. This creates a culture where managers think like owners rather than caretakers. This matters because with thousands of stores Walmart cannot operate effectively with a solely top-down command and control structure. One of Walmart’s stated values is respect for the individual. This includes promoting from within, direct communications, problem escalation, and approachability of leadership. There is a performance edge too – respect does not mean low standards. Walmart’s culture is deeply customer first, but in a practical value-driven way. The customer is assumed to want low prices, convenience, and reliability above all. Employees at all levels understand who the customer is and what matters most to them.
Amazon’s culture shares many of Walmart’s elements but with a harder edge. Amazon’s success is rooted in a distinctive, demanding, and highly systematised culture that prioritises customer obsession, speed, and operational rigour above everything else. It is not a “nice” culture in the traditional sense, but it is an extraordinarily effective execution culture when aligned with Amazon’s strategy and scale. Its first and most famous leadership principle is “Customer Obsession.” This is not marketing language; it is an operational doctrine. Decisions are framed around long-term customer value, not short-term profit. Teams work backwards from customer needs using Amazon’s “working backwards” process. In a complex organisation, customer obsession provides clarity and is a unifying decision rule. Amazon values speed over perfection.
The bias for action encourages teams to make decisions quickly with incomplete information. Small failures are accepted as the cost of learning. Bureaucracy is treated as an existential threat. This culture allows Amazon to move faster than traditional retailers, even on a huge scale. High performance is expected, measured, and enforced. Goals are aggressive, missed targets scrutinised and deficient performance quickly addressed. Results matter more than intentions. As with Walmart, frugality and management “ownership” are key components of the Amazon culture. There is an obsessiveness around cost control and performance delivery. Jeff Bezos famously argued that constraints “breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention.” The culture prioritises innovation over consensus. This cultural trait enabled Amazon to enter businesses others thought irrational: cloud computing (AWS), hardware (Kindle, Echo) and original media. Amazon treats stagnation as failure. Successful products are cannibalised before competitors can do it. Teams are encouraged to do “day one” thinking, operating as if the company was always just starting. This explains how Amazon evolved from an online bookstore into logistics, cloud computing, advertising, and an AI powerhouse. Amazon’s culture is not universally admired, and that is intentional. It comes with high stress burnout, zero tolerance for under performance and less emphasis on work-life balance. Amazon embraces these trade-offs for scale, speed, and long-term dominance.
Organisational culture is far more than a set of platitudes on a poster; it is a living system that shapes strategy execution, innovation, employee engagement, customer experience, and financial performance. Academic research consistently demonstrates that strong, aligned cultures contribute to superior outcomes across diverse contexts. Luis V Gerstner Jr. former CEO of IBM stated that “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game”.
David Gilroy, Store Excel
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