Culture Champions by CultureX

Goldman Sachs is a titan of finance but, for a giant, it is remarkably dynamic. Our MIT research has identified the company as a Culture Champion, recognized for its remarkable agility. 
Agility is a strategic dimension of culture that allows a firm to respond to changing market circumstances and nimbly seize emerging opportunities.
In this discussion, Jacqueline Arthur, Goldman’s senior-most human capital management executive, walks through how Goldman has cultivated such a remarkable culture of agility while attracting a distinctive and impressive employee base.

Kunal Kapoor is the CEO of Morningstar. 
In 1984, Morningstar was founded out of a Chicago apartment, named after a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote. The company aimed to empower investors to make more successful decisions by providing them with high quality insights. Ten years later, Morningstar had about 200 employees, and around that time Kunal became one of them. 
Since then, the company has indeed transcended, albeit in a direction more NASDAQ than Walden Pond. In 2005, the company went public. Over the next twenty years, the company’s revenue and headcount grew more than tenfold, to $2.3 billion and 11,000 employees. Along the way, the company broadened its customer base, global footprint, and product line. 
Core to Morningstar’s success is its distinctive culture, which works both for employees and stakeholders. On Glassdoor, employees are significantly more likely to positively mention the culture than employees from peer firms. Its culture excels on specific targeted dimensions; employees are also off the charts more positive about educational opportunities (“growth mindset” Morningstar core value) and cross silo collaboration (“one team”), for instance.  
In this episode, Kunal walks us through why culture matters so much to Morningstar and how he and his fellow leaders crafted such an excellent one as the company rapidly grew by two orders of magnitude.

Craig Kliethermes is the CEO of RLI Insurance Company
In 1961, Gerald Stephens founded Replacement Lens Inc to offer a novel insurance policy that covered the cost of replacing contact lenses. As the price of contacts fell over time, insurance demand fell as well, but RLI already diversified into other niche insurance markets. 
Today, RLI offers dozens of highly specialized insurance products across a wide range of niche markets that fill unmet customer needs 
This steady stream of new product introductions has allowed RLI to deliver the highest revenue growth among specialty insurers over the past five years and total shareholder returns at the top of the industry
RLI attributes much of the company’s success to great people and its distinctive culture, captured in the tagline "different works."
Employees love the culture, and have voted RLI one of Glassdoor’s best places to work for four of the last six years.
RLI puts five core values--ownership, customer focus, drive, innovation, and integrity at the heart of its culture  
We analyzed how more than 50,000 employees described their company in Glassdoor reviews for 45 insurance companies.  We found that RLI employees spoke about the company's core values much more frequently and positively than employees in peer companies.  
In this episode, Craig discusses the vital role culture plays in RLI’s success, and how the company fosters such a strong one.

Adam Holton is the Chief People Officer of GE HealthCare. 
General Electric entered the healthcare more than one hundred years ago. In January 2023, GE HealthCare was spun off from General Electric as a publicly traded company with more than 50,000 employees and 2024 revenue of nearly $20 billion. 
Especially since its spin-off, GE HealthCare has cultivated a best-in-industry culture, as measured by Glassdoor ratings. Employees speak two standard deviations more positively than peers about learning and development and feeling respected. GE HealthCare also has a demonstrably non-toxic culture where employees feel like they are treated fairly. 
Before launching a corporate career in a series of senior HR roles at GE, USAA, CHS, Numotion, and Amedisys, Adam was a US Marine, which shaped his thinking on business management and culture.
In this episode, Adam reveals the secrets of GE HealthCare’s resounding cultural success in the face of a turbulent transition and reflects on how the strong culture of the Marine Corps influenced his approach.

When Steve joined Milwaukee Tool as president in 2007, the company was 83 years old and sold a limited range of traditional power tools
During his tenure as president, Steve led a remarkable transformation of the company’s strategy and culture that produced a steady stream of technical and product innovations. 
Today, Milwaukee Tool sells a wide range of cordless power tools for the building trades, and is the market share leader in North America and globally. This steady stream of new products has allowed Milwaukee Tool to deliver double-digit revenue growth, year-in and year-out, for nearly two decades. And over the past ten years, Milwaukee Tools’ parent company has generated total shareholder returns of 17% CAGR, versus 7% for its direct competitors and 11% for the industrial sector as a whole
Steve attributes much of the company’s success to great people and its distinctive culture. And employees agree. Employees have voted Milwaukee Tool one of Glassdoor’s best places to work for three of the last five years. Not only do employees love the culture, they also say Milwaukee Tool excels on its core values of empowered leaders, candor, and speed/agility/urgency. 
We analyzed how more than 40,000 employees described their company in Glassdoor reviews for 27 industrials. Milwaukee Tool employees were nearly twice as likely to mention empowerment, and discuss it more than twice as positively as the average industrial. 
In this episode Steve, who is now the CEO of Milwaukee Tools’ parent company, reveals the secret of Milwaukee Tool’s cultural success.