# Does national culture shape leadership?

- **Episode:** [217](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/217.md) (2025-07-24)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** national-culture, leadership, management
- **Time:** 33:40–38:33 (start 2020s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/217?t=2020](https://truthliesandwork.com/217?t=2020)

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[33:40] Leanne Elliott: Andrew's podcast is packed with examples just like this
[33:44] Andrew Palmer: So, there's a medical tech firm called Stryker, which is based in Kalamazoo, and that's in Michigan. And it's a weird place because you have, the divisions are named after body parts. So, you know, you can start off in knee, but if you're lucky, you might get promoted to pancreas or something like that. It's all very, it's a weird sort of place. But the reason that it's interesting is that they have, again, a very clear sense of what culture they want. They want basically performance-driven, low-ego kind of underdogs. That's what they just want, this sort of hunger. So it's very, it's quite, it's not a particularly cuddly place, I don't think, but it's driven by achievement. And this is the point on levers that they, the guy I spoke to there is the CEO called Kevin Lobo, who sort of can articulate this for himself, but then has it driven through the entire company. So one sort of example, which I hadn't come across before, was just structural. So when their divisions grow to a certain size, they split them in 2. And so at that point, you are back to you're no longer number one in your market and you've got to grow again. So they're very, very keen on organizationally constantly sort of requiring you to think about growth and being the top dog in a market is not helpful for that. All of their hiring, all their performance management is based around that quite hard-edged way of thinking about things. So if you you're in sales and you're 99.9% of your budget, you missed your budget. That's it. So it's that kind of, but as I was talking to him, you know, and he went through absolutely everything in the company, it was clear that they had just lined up all of these things in a way that transmitted the same message. And that was super effective. So Novo Nordisk, which is the company that makes Wegovy and Ozempic in Copenhagen has a process called facilitations. And facilitations is, they don't like this word, but it basically is a cultural audit. And what that is, is basically sort of experienced employees, some of them full-time, some of them not, have the job of sort of going around departments, divisions around the world and around the company. They spend time with those units. They interview the bosses and the people within them. And the goal is to try and work out whether the values of the company are genuinely being lived. And then all of those cultural auditors come back and report into senior leadership. So there is some kind of independent monitoring of whether the culture exists when the CEO is not there, which is a good definition of culture. And that's their way of kind of ensuring that actually things are working as they should
[36:44] Al Elliott: You just mentioned it was very Danish. So do you think that culture is perhaps affected by where you are? Like if you're Japanese or Danish or American?
[36:54] Andrew Palmer: Yeah, completely. So I don't think culture necessarily has to be a prison. So Toyota, which is a very sort of, you know, you'd sort of associate Japanese society with a kind of hierarchical way of behaving. That hierarchy definitely exists. It definitely came off the company when I was there, but they just managed to make that coexist with a culture of feedback and what they like to call the inverted pyramid. So manager's job was to support the workers rather than give them instructions. So I don't think culture has to be a prison, but it definitely has an impact. So actually, Novo are interesting on this because the bosses there spend a lot of time with the scientists. They want to have sort of back and forth. They want to understand what's going on. And they're quite into— it's a Dutch sociologist called Geert Hofstede has these measures of defining national culture. And one of them— is to do with your willingness to challenge basically sort of hierarchy, levels of hierarchy. And people from different nationalities can find it kind of more or less comfortable to be expected to go in and sort of talk and challenge the big cheese at a company. So culture definitely has some kind of impact there, but there are ways around it. Again, being Being thoughtful about these things definitely helps