Culture is the operating system that turns strategy into adoption; it is how ideas gain legitimacy, how new technologies earn trust, and how organisations build lasting relationships with the communities they serve. As part of its ninth annual collaboration with The Female Quotient at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Boster Group convened a panel of global leaders to explore how culture creates economic advantage: shaping decision-making, accelerating innovation, and unlocking new pathways to trust and value creation.
Moderated by Susan Boster (Founder and CEO, Boster Group), the conversation convened Lisa Knight Gibby (Chief Communications Officer, Nestlé), Heather Stockton (Global Leader, Consultative Business, Deloitte), Charlotte West (Vice President of Global Corporate Communications, Lenovo and Director, Lenovo Foundation), Nicola Mendelsohn, CBE (Head of the Global Business Group, Meta) and Chanida Klyphun (Director of Public Policy for Southeast Asia, ByteDance). Together, they reinforced a core belief at Boster Group: that culture, when approached thoughtfully and collaboratively, is one of the most effective ways to align purpose with performance. By designing and measuring partnerships that operate credibly within culture, leaders can convert cultural relevance into enduring value, opportunity and trust.
From Left to Right:: Susan Boster (Founder and CEO, Boster Group), Lisa Knight Gibby (Chief Communications Officer, Nestlé), Heather Stockton (Global Leader, Consultative Business, Deloitte), Charlotte West (Vice President of Global Corporate Communications and Director, Lenovo Foundation, Lenovo), Chanida Klyphun (Director of Public Policy for Southeast Asia, ByteDance) and Nicola Mendelsohn, CBE (Head of the Global Business Group, Meta).
Curiosity as a Strategic Capability: How Leaders Know What Matters in Culture
Across the panel, curiosity emerged as the starting point for leaders seeking to leverage culture as a strategic tool. In fast-moving environments, culture accelerates decision-making only when organisations invest in listening deeply and continuously.
Heather emphasised the importance of engaging outside voices to separate meaningful signals from noise. Understanding what competitors, customers, creators, analysts and partners are actually doing—not just what they are saying—allows organisations to move decisively. This belief underpins Boster Group’s rigorous due diligence process, which prioritises listening across stakeholders and ecosystems in order to devise stronger strategies and outcomes.
Chanida echoed this point, encouraging leaders to listen to the communities they operate in. “Trust flows through people and their communities” and ultimately unlocks economic opportunity, determining which brands cultivate lasting relevance and growth. Curiosity, in this sense, is not passive observation. It is an active leadership discipline that allows culture to inform strategy rather than react to it. For leaders, this requires broadening the inputs that inform decision-making and placing greater weight on lived behaviours, community signals and external perspectives alongside traditional performance metrics.
“Culture becomes currency when it turns attention into participation, participation into trust, and trust into economic opportunity.”
Chanida Klyphun
Coherence and Glocal Fluidity: How Businesses Scale Culture
Curiosity creates understanding; coherence allows that understanding to scale. Culture only becomes currency when it can operate at scale. Glocal fluidity – the ability to balance global coherence with meaningful local expression – is where that conversion begins.
This was clear in Charlotte’s perspective on how Lenovo’s culture enables it to outperform competitors. Having grown through major acquisitions to enter new markets, Lenovo operates with highly dispersed, international teams. The organisation treats that diversity as an asset, allowing local teams to operate with autonomy within a shared set of global values and a common operating model. That internal cultural fluency and flexibility translates directly into external advantages. Lenovo’s local-first mindset enables the business to engage distinct communities – such as mobile-first gaming audiences in Southeast Asia and PC-driven gamers in the West – with greater precision, driving higher conversion without fragmenting the brand. This preference for locally-relevant solutions is supported by the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, which found that trust is increasingly “going local”—with audiences placing greater weight on proximity, familiarity and relevance.
Net Trust in Neighbours, Family, Friends and Coworkers increased 11 pts in 2026
Edelman Trust Barometer
Lisa then highlighted that in an environment where digital platforms can close the distance between local and global communications instantly, it is still essential that local communications clearly align with a coherent global narrative to both proactively drive growth and to navigate scrutiny and crisis.
These are not opposing approaches. They describe the same system at work: a clear cultural centre creates alignment, local fluency enables relevance, and the fluidity to move between them organisationally creates coherence. This has direct implications for how leaders structure teams, delegate authority and evaluate performance to reward alignment and judgement rather than uniformity. As an example, Nicola opened by discussing how many organisations want to reward risk-taking in innovation contexts; however, if you want to take risks as a company, you need a culture that rewards risk-taking by employees and by partners, even when those decisions may not work out. As that level of coherence is established both within an organisation and across its partnerships, collaboration quickly becomes the accelerant.
Collaboration as Infrastructure: How Culture is Activated Credibly
The panel repeatedly highlighted that the complexity of today’s cultural, technological and societal challenges cannot be addressed in isolation. Partnerships, when designed with intent, extend capability, embed credibility, and allow organisations to participate meaningfully in culture rather than merely reference it.
At Boster Group, we know that alignment around the purpose of a partnership is what determines whether it builds credibility or simply creates noise, something Charlotte echoed. Lenovo’s partnerships with Formula One and the FIFA World Cup, for example, are effective because they align directly with the company’s brand vision for Smarter Technology for All while embedding Lenovo’s capabilities into globally trusted cultural platforms.
Lisa noted that the same principle applies to creator partnerships, such as Nescafé’s collaborations around global cold coffee trends on social media. In each case, partnerships act as a bridge between internal intent and external participation, extending reach and influence into communities while reinforcing trust with a new generation of consumers. Organisations that treat those partnerships as strategic infrastructure rather than tactical amplification are better positioned to earn trust at scale.
As part of its ninth year partnering with The Female Quotient at the World Economic Forum, Boster Group convened this conversation to reflect a simple but powerful belief supported by over 25 years advising corporate leaders on strategic partnerships: that culture, when approached thoughtfully and collaboratively, is one of the most effective tools available to modern organisations.
Watch the full panel discussion on The Female Quotient’s LinkedIn channel.