How great cultures are built and rebuilt: lessons from Angela Ahrendts, Dara Khosrowshahi, and Eric Schmidt

Executive overview

Culture is the personality of a company — living, breathing, and shaped by every decision a leader makes. Authentic communication, fast action, and listening at scale are what separate cultures that endure from those that drift.

Three leaders who transformed major organisations share how they approached culture from day one. Each story surfaces a different principle: authenticity over performance, speed in a turnaround window, and the risk of crowdsourcing without conviction.

The core insight: you have six to nine months to change a culture before you're stuck with it — and the only way to lead authentically is to go first.

First impressions set the culture

• Angela Ahrendts declined a polished email in favour of a one-take iPhone video to 60,000 Apple retail employees on her first day.
• Taking her daughter's call mid-video and sending it anyway generated thousands of grateful responses — it proved she was human.
• The act signalled: leadership here is about heart, not hierarchy.
• At Burberry she publicly told her top 100, three days in, that those not aligned could leave with a strong package — no ambiguity.

The turnaround window

• Lou Gerstner's principle: you have six to nine months to change a culture before you're stuck with it.
• Dara Khosrowshahi told Uber employees at an all-hands: "We don't have a PR problem. We have an us problem."
• That statement opened the door to real structural changes — fixing who was promoted, how people acted.
• Eric Schmidt at Novell: accidentally summoned the 10 smartest employees for "30-minute no-agenda meetings" — the standard firing signal. He learned culture trumps every assumption.
• In a turnaround, roughly 80% of the management team turns over; the question is just the rate.

Crowdsourcing culture: benefits and limits

• Uber crowdsourced its new cultural norms bottoms-up after the leadership crisis — it helped the company define what it was not.
• The limit: averaging 20,000 opinions produces average opinions, not the distinctive values that make a company different.
• Khosrowshahi later revisited those norms to add a stronger top-down point of view after earning the organisation's trust.
• Angela Ahrendts at Apple did a six-month crowdsourcing exercise asking retail employees what the company should do more of in their communities — that input directly shaped the in-store experience.
• Because employees co-created it, adoption scaled to 20–30k sessions a week without resistance.

Scaling culture as the company grows

• At Burberry and Apple, Ahrendts hired a cultural anthropologist to study what had worked and embed it into onboarding.
• Apple produced a human responsibility report to document cultural expectations alongside financial and environmental reports — removing ambiguity.
• Eric Schmidt at Google kept a revenue analytics engineer as his office mate until SEC rules prevented it; later stationed four physicists outside his office to flag anomalies.
• The smartest people in an organisation carry followership — if they're culturally misaligned, the damage is outsized.

Authenticity over advice

• Khosrowshahi tried "managing by walking the halls" after reading about it — it was deeply uncomfortable and produced nothing useful.
• His lesson: take advice selectively. Only adopt what fits you, or it won't work.
• Ahrendts: culture is the personality of the company — constant, consistent, authentic communication and listening is what keeps it alive.
• Eric Schmidt's takeaway for established organisations: ask employees "are we at the state of the art?" — they know what else is going on, even when leadership doesn't.