After spending more than two decades as a HR practitioner, I have come to believe that culture is perhaps the most underestimated force in business.
We obsess over strategy, technology, processes and performance metrics. We debate operating models and transformation roadmaps. Yet, when organizations succeed spectacularly or fail unexpectedly, the root cause often lies somewhere far less tangible.
It lies in culture.
Culture is the invisible oxygen of an organization. Nobody notices it when it is healthy, but the moment it weakens, everyone feels its absence. Teams lose energy. Decision-making slows down. Trust begins to erode. High performers disengage long before they resign.
The interesting thing about culture is that it rarely announces itself. It reveals itself quietly in how leaders respond during uncertainty, how teams collaborate under pressure, how decisions are made when nobody is watching, and how people treat each other when there is nothing to gain.
In many ways, culture is not what an organization says it values. Culture is what people consistently experience.
This reality becomes even more relevant when an organization evolves from a single business into a diversified enterprise. Growth creates new opportunities, but it also introduces a fundamental leadership challenge:
As we build new businesses, what must never change?
The answer to this question often determines whether a group becomes a collection of successful businesses or remains a truly integrated enterprise bound together by a common identity.
The journeys of Tata, Reliance and InterGlobe offer three fascinating answers to this challenge.
Tata Group: Preserving Values While Encouraging Diversity
What I find most remarkable about the Tata Group is not the longevity of the group, but the intentionality with which it has preserved its values across generations.
The Tata Group has spent over a century treating culture as something too important to be left to informal transmission alone. For decades, Tata’s ethos travelled the way most family businesses pass on their values: through stories, mentorship and the example set by senior leaders. Ratan Tata himself once observed that there was no formal orientation booklet for Tata’s culture in his early years at the group; it was carried forward through interaction between predecessors and successors rather than through a manual.
That changed in the mid-1990s with the introduction of the Tata Code of Conduct (TCOC), which codified the group’s core values of integrity, unity, responsibility, excellence and understanding into a single document every employee and director was expected to sign. What makes this instructive for any diversified organisation is the balance it strikes: the Code of Conduct is deliberately thin on operational instruction and thick on ethical non-negotiables. Individual Tata companies, from steel to software to hospitality, are left free to build very different operating cultures, customer philosophies and even management styles, provided they stay anchored to that shared ethical spine. Culture, in the Tata model, is a constitution rather than a manual.
The lesson here is profound: Culture does not need to create uniformity. In fact, its real purpose is to create alignment without sacrificing individuality.
Tata demonstrates that when values are clear, businesses can operate differently without drifting apart.
Reliance: Building Culture Around Shared Aspiration
Reliance offers a very different perspective.
Where Tata operates through a shared ethical framework, Reliance has historically built culture through a shared ambition.
From Dhirubhai Ambani’s earliest years building the company, the emphasis was on collective ambition around a single, founder-articulated vision, paired with an unusually high tolerance for risk and speed. Rather than codifying values into a written charter, Reliance has tended to socialise its culture actively into every new employee, treating it as something that must be consciously installed rather than simply absorbed.
Mukesh Ambani has described the company’s people philosophy as resting on three factors he refers to as character, competence and culture, with character weighted above competence because competence can be built later while trust cannot. He has also been candid that bringing new people into Reliance’s institutional culture takes deliberate, sustained effort, since recruits do not arrive with the same orientation already in place. This is culture as a strong current rather than a light framework: highly centralised, tightly linked to the promoter’s vision, and reinforced continuously rather than left to organic transmission. It has served Reliance well for rapid, high-stakes diversification into telecom, retail and energy, though it depends heavily on the clarity and consistency of leadership at the centre to keep multiple, very different businesses pulling in the same direction.
What stands out to me is the recognition that culture is not self-sustaining. It must be actively reinforced. New employees do not automatically inherit organizational beliefs. They need help understanding not only what the company does, but how it thinks.
In a rapidly growing organization, culture cannot be left to chance.
It must be designed.
InterGlobe: The Power of Consistent Intent
As I reflect on InterGlobe’s journey, what becomes evident is an interesting balance between entrepreneurial freedom and disciplined execution.
InterGlobe Enterprises offers a quieter but equally instructive case. Founded in 1989 by Kapil Bhatia Sir and built out over the following decades by the next generation, the group has grown from a single air-transport-representation business into a genuinely diverse portfolio spanning civil aviation through IndiGo, hospitality through InterGlobe Hotels, aircraft maintenance and pilot training through CAE Simulation Training Private Limited, logistics through MOVIN (a Joint venture between UPS & InterGlobe) to the latest kid on the block into AI products & services -AIonOS . Throughout roughly three and a half decades, these businesses have operated in markets as different as budget air travel, luxury hospitality and enterprise technology services, each with its own competitive rhythm and their own definition of a good day at work.
What has kept that portfolio recognisably one group rather than a loose holding company is not a single written code so much as a consistent operating temperament that the promoters have described as resting on conviction, calculated risk-taking, strong relationships, and rigorous planning paired with operational excellence. That temperament shows up differently in each business: IndiGo built its brand on punctuality and cost discipline, InterGlobe Hotels built partnerships with global names such as Accor to bring international hospitality standards into India, and the technology & logistics arm built deep, process-driven relationships with global travel and logistics partners. Yet in every case, the underlying instinct is the same: plan meticulously, execute with discipline, and let the specific business express that discipline in its own idiom.
The Group has long demonstrated a strong commitment to nurturing a culture of care, treating reliability and professionalism as strategic leadership imperatives, equal in importance to business and financial performance. That is a telling signal for any diversified group: culture is worth naming out loud as something to be actively stewarded, not just assumed to persist. What binds these businesses together is not similarity of products or markets. It is similarity of mindset.
Behind every successful InterGlobe venture appears to be a common belief: plan deeply, execute relentlessly, and build relationships that endure.
This shared intent has enabled businesses operating in entirely different industries to remain connected by a common organizational character.
The Culture Question Every Leader Must Answer
Looking across these organizations, I am convinced there is no universal blueprint for building culture.
There is no perfect model.
Some organizations codify culture. Others institutionalize it through leadership behaviour. Still others reinforce it through shared ambition and disciplined execution.
Yet all successful models seem to begin with one principle:
“Leaders are clear about what is non-negotiable.”
When people understand the few beliefs that must remain constant, they gain the confidence to innovate, adapt and evolve everywhere else.
For HR leaders, this is perhaps one of the most important responsibilities we carry.
Our role is not merely to build policies, frameworks or engagement initiatives. Our role is to protect the invisible threads that connect people across businesses, geographies and generations.
Because culture is not what holds an organization together when everything is going well.
Culture is what holds it together when everything else is being tested.
And in an increasingly complex world, that may well be an organization’s most enduring competitive advantage.