Corporate Heritage vs Corporate Culture

And mistaking one for the other could be one of the most dangerous things a growing business can do.

The business I lead is embarking on a new strategic era, one which will also include a significant milestone, as we will be celebrating our 25th year in business in 2028.

I’ve been with the business for half of those years; some colleagues have been here for all of it. Yet, there remains almost 40% of our colleagues that have been with us for less than twelve months – a reflection of the extent and pace at which we have grown.

It’s a wonderfully diverse mix of lived, colleague experiences spanning every era of our evolution as a business. But it raises a question I find myself returning to with increasing regularity:

At what point does the heritage created through our journey to date become unhelpful in shaping the organisational culture for the journey ahead?

I think it is a question that’s relevant well beyond the boundaries of our own business, because eras are not unique to us. Both the insurance and legal sectors, like many others, have been through significant consolidation and shifts in recent years, with each wave reshaping businesses, shifting identities, priorities and ambitions, and creating new questions on where the business goes next. The challenge, as I see it, is how a business transitions between these eras while continuing to create a genuine sense of belonging – especially when the stories of the past are just not relevant for everyone. It’s here where I see an important distinction between heritage and culture that I think matters enormously and gets overlooked too often. Corporate heritage is not corporate culture. But it’s easy to mistake one for the other, particularly in a business with a strong history.

In any business transformation, the stories of survival and challenge that bond a founding cohort together are real and powerful. For those of us who navigated the turbulent years of regulatory reform in personal injury law, for example, it was formative. The bonds formed under pressure; the collective identity built through shared challenge – these things shaped who we became. They’re genuinely worth being proud of. They are the roots from which everything else has grown. And for those who were part of that journey, who gave something of themselves to building what exists today, that identity runs deep. It should. It was hard-earned.

But when businesses treat experiences like this as the definition of who they are, rather than the evidence of it, I fear it risks something I have come to think of as nostalgia dressed up as culture. And nostalgia, however warmly felt, is not a substitute for the hard work of building a culture that connects everyone – new and long-serving – to something they genuinely feel part of today.

If left unmanaged, new colleagues can sense there’s a history they are not part of. They can feel the weight of it without being able to access it. And in time, without intention, the people who were there and the people who were not become two different kinds of colleague – belonging to two different versions of the same business. And the result? The business fails to harness everything that those new colleagues bring – the fresh perspectives, the different experiences, the new energy.

Nobody would consciously choose that outcome. But in my experience, if left to its own devices, it happens anyway. Which is perhaps the point.

The culture you do not design will design itself. And in a business going through an era transition, you may not like what it becomes.

Heritage isn’t an issue in of itself. Indeed, when heritage is positioned in a tone of progression, it tells a very different story. It says this is what we learned, this is who we became, and this is what it means for where we are going. That framing includes everyone – the people who were there and the people who just arrived. It turns the past into a foundation rather than a ceiling and creates the basis for a shared experience that doesn’t require a history lesson to understand, and moments of collective purpose that new colleagues can own as fully as those who have been here for years.

Heritage naturally accumulates over time – shaped by events of the past. However culture, I believe, has to be designed. And that only becomes possible when businesses stop treating it as an ‘atmosphere’ and start treating it as the sum of its tangible parts.

The question is not whether you are shaping your culture. The question is whether you are doing it deliberately.

Shaping a culture deliberately, in my experience, means being explicit about what you want your culture to be in this era – not the last one – and then designing the signals, the structures and the stories that reinforce it. It means asking, honestly, whether the way you talk about your past is inspiring the people around you or subtly excluding them.

As CEO, I believe this is one of the most important and most underrated responsibilities in a business navigating an era transition. It may not be the most visible, nor the easiest to measure, but it’s one of the most consequential – because the culture a business has in five years’ time is being shaped right now, in the decisions leaders are making and the signals they are sending, whether they realise it or not.

So, by all means, let’s honour the journey. Be proud of what’s been survived, and what’s been built, and preserve the best parts of our respective heritages as important context for the future.

But I would argue that we should not mistake any of that for culture. I do not think culture can be stored in a founding story or measured in years of service. It has to be earned, every day – not just in the signals leaders send, but in the new stories everyone tells, the new symbols everyone sees and the new actions everyone takes.