How Culture will save or kill your business
February 19, 2026
Lessons from Jesper Brodin, CEO of IKEA, how culture empowered 170,000 internal entrepreneurs to secure IKEA’s business in a global catastrophe
IKEA is one of the most remarkable retail success stories of recent years, built on a clever combination of affordability, design, and customer experience. With a strong focus on sustainability, innovation, and operational efficiency.
IKEA’s entire strategic design has been to immerse customers in a carefully curated retail experience - encouraging exploration, inspiration, and impulse buying through their iconic showroom layouts. Which means that IKEA did not prioritise online retail. Because on-line I’ll buy a £8 lamp. In store I’ll discover I really need a boot full of flatpack and finish my day off with a plate of Swedish meatballs.
It's a brilliant strategy that drove decades of growth and €44bn of sales.
It also exposed the company to an existential risk when COVID global lockdowns forced store closures across almost all its markets.
In total, IKEA lost around 55,000 trading days. And, in common with most businesses at the time, it had no prepared response to this unfolding disaster. As CEO Jesper Brodin told me “there was no manual for this crisis.”
Yet rather than freezing under uncertainty, the organisation responded with remarkable agility. Brodin says they were able to act with “an amazing speed”. “We were not like some other organizations waiting for the top to respond,” he explained, “our people start to act. We’re a flat organisation; when we don’t know the instructions, we follow our common sense and our hearts.”
That “common sense” quickly translated into store-level innovation. Local market teams made their own operational decisions - adjusting opening hours, adopting car parks as retail space, delivering in personal vehicles, establishing local online fulfilment solutions - without waiting for head office approval. This flexibility and autonomy enabled IKEA to keep serving customers while protecting its people.
What accounts for that flexibility and autonomy is not strategy. But Values. Enshrined in IKEA’s ‘compass’ and deeply embedded in its culture. Values that include Togetherness, Caring, Giving and Taking Responsibility, and Leading by Example.
And the behaviours they created were extraordinary. Across the business, people did not wait to be told. They felt they were in this together. They felt safe to take immediate and radical action. Because they knew they could and should take responsibility and lead.
The lesson from IKEA is that Values are not just something you stick on a wall or bury on a website. They are the drivers of a culture that manages risk, galvanizes innovation and powers agility in a volatile business world.
At the heart of IKEA’s Values lies a deep sense of trust. As Brodin puts it, “Trust means that you breed a culture where it’s okay to fail, where it’s okay to not be perfect and it’s easy to talk about learning from mistakes. We celebrate mistakes and learn fast.”
Evidence from the Contexis Performance Culture Index® shows that employees who feel positive trust are 50% more committed, 60% more psychologically safe and 75% less anxious.
Trust creates an environment where people will take responsibility. Because trust is the parent of ownership. And that fuels innovation, encourages accountability, and focusses energy.
The takeaway lessons from my conversation with Jesper Brodin are clear. To survive and thrive in a volatile and unpredictable world, we need to take culture far more seriously. To see it as a core asset. To see that Values are the power of the business, not a peripheral add on. And that the rocket-fuel of culture is trust.
Organizations must be safe spaces, where people feel safe to bring their whole selves to work and take responsibility to protect and build the organization. Both because it matters to them and because they feel that they will not be blamed or belittled for trying.
Without a very specific set of values, carefully considered and consistently lived, built on profound trust, IKEA would not have weathered the pandemic without enormous cost. As Jesper Brodin reflects “we have high trust so people throughout the organization make decisions; I realized I employed 170,000 entrepreneurs in the business. That is the energy of the company.”
John Rosing sat down with Jesper Brodin as part of the Leaders on Purpose CEO Study 2024 “Purpose in Action: Leading Business Change in a Volatile World.” The full Report can be downloaded at https://www.leadersonpurpose.com/2024-ceo-study
IKEA is one of the most remarkable retail success stories of recent years, built on a clever combination of affordability, design, and customer experience. With a strong focus on sustainability, innovation, and operational efficiency.
IKEA’s entire strategic design has been to immerse customers in a carefully curated retail experience - encouraging exploration, inspiration, and impulse buying through their iconic showroom layouts. Which means that IKEA did not prioritise online retail. Because on-line I’ll buy a £8 lamp. In store I’ll discover I really need a boot full of flatpack and finish my day off with a plate of Swedish meatballs.
It's a brilliant strategy that drove decades of growth and €44bn of sales.
It’s a strategy that could – and perhaps should – have killed the business
It also exposed the company to an existential risk when COVID global lockdowns forced store closures across almost all its markets.
In total, IKEA lost around 55,000 trading days. And, in common with most businesses at the time, it had no prepared response to this unfolding disaster. As CEO Jesper Brodin told me “there was no manual for this crisis.”
Yet rather than freezing under uncertainty, the organisation responded with remarkable agility. Brodin says they were able to act with “an amazing speed”. “We were not like some other organizations waiting for the top to respond,” he explained, “our people start to act. We’re a flat organisation; when we don’t know the instructions, we follow our common sense and our hearts.”
What accounts for IKEA thriving in the pandemic is not its strategy. But it’s culture
That “common sense” quickly translated into store-level innovation. Local market teams made their own operational decisions - adjusting opening hours, adopting car parks as retail space, delivering in personal vehicles, establishing local online fulfilment solutions - without waiting for head office approval. This flexibility and autonomy enabled IKEA to keep serving customers while protecting its people.
What accounts for that flexibility and autonomy is not strategy. But Values. Enshrined in IKEA’s ‘compass’ and deeply embedded in its culture. Values that include Togetherness, Caring, Giving and Taking Responsibility, and Leading by Example.
And the behaviours they created were extraordinary. Across the business, people did not wait to be told. They felt they were in this together. They felt safe to take immediate and radical action. Because they knew they could and should take responsibility and lead.
Values as the fundamental strategic asset in the business
The lesson from IKEA is that Values are not just something you stick on a wall or bury on a website. They are the drivers of a culture that manages risk, galvanizes innovation and powers agility in a volatile business world.
At the heart of IKEA’s Values lies a deep sense of trust. As Brodin puts it, “Trust means that you breed a culture where it’s okay to fail, where it’s okay to not be perfect and it’s easy to talk about learning from mistakes. We celebrate mistakes and learn fast.”
Evidence from the Contexis Performance Culture Index® shows that employees who feel positive trust are 50% more committed, 60% more psychologically safe and 75% less anxious.
Trust creates an environment where people will take responsibility. Because trust is the parent of ownership. And that fuels innovation, encourages accountability, and focusses energy.
The takeaway lessons from my conversation with Jesper Brodin are clear. To survive and thrive in a volatile and unpredictable world, we need to take culture far more seriously. To see it as a core asset. To see that Values are the power of the business, not a peripheral add on. And that the rocket-fuel of culture is trust.
Organizations must be safe spaces, where people feel safe to bring their whole selves to work and take responsibility to protect and build the organization. Both because it matters to them and because they feel that they will not be blamed or belittled for trying.
Without a very specific set of values, carefully considered and consistently lived, built on profound trust, IKEA would not have weathered the pandemic without enormous cost. As Jesper Brodin reflects “we have high trust so people throughout the organization make decisions; I realized I employed 170,000 entrepreneurs in the business. That is the energy of the company.”
John Rosing sat down with Jesper Brodin as part of the Leaders on Purpose CEO Study 2024 “Purpose in Action: Leading Business Change in a Volatile World.” The full Report can be downloaded at https://www.leadersonpurpose.com/2024-ceo-study
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