Cultural transformation is no longer a feel-good initiative buried in an HR deck — it is the operating system behind every company that outperforms its market. In 2026, the organisations pulling ahead are the ones that treat culture as a measurable, governable asset with a direct line to revenue, innovation, and resilience. That conviction sits at the heart of the HR World Summit 2026, taking place May 26–27 in Porto, Portugal, where the track titled “Culture as a Strategic Asset: Driving Business Through Values” brings together senior leaders from Solvay, Procter & Gamble, and Opella to unpack exactly how cultural transformation converts into business results.
What makes this track compelling is not the theory — it is the operational proof. Three distinct vantage points converge on a single argument: strategy without cultural alignment is just a slide deck, and technology without cultural readiness is just a budget line. Let’s look at why that matters and what HR leaders can expect to take away.
The Performance Formula: Why Cultural Transformation Drives Results
Mark van Bijsterveld, Chief People Officer at Solvay and a member of the company’s Executive Committee, will share a framework that reframes how leadership teams should think about performance. At Solvay, the equation is explicit: Strategy × Culture × Operating Model = Performance. Remove any one variable — or treat it as an afterthought — and the entire equation collapses. Culture is not the soft multiplier; it is the engine of organisational transformation.
Solvay’s own journey illustrates the point. The company has undergone a significant transformation, and van Bijsterveld will detail the HR interventions that made it stick. Central to that story is what he calls a Long-term People Agenda — a forward-looking blueprint that future-proofs the organisation by embedding cultural priorities into workforce planning, leadership development, and capability building over a multi-year horizon.
This is a critical shift for HR leaders to absorb. A high-performance culture does not emerge from a single engagement survey cycle or a leadership offsite. It requires sustained, intentional investment — the kind that treats people strategy with the same rigour as capital allocation. When culture is wired into the operating model, every decision from hiring to resource deployment reinforces the same strategic direction.
For anyone still debating whether culture and business performance are genuinely linked, Solvay’s framework offers a concrete, measurable answer: they are not just linked — they are inseparable.
Building an AI-Ready Culture
Technology adoption without cultural readiness is one of the most expensive mistakes a company can make. Jochen Brenner, Vice President of Human Resources at Procter & Gamble, will tackle this head-on with a session focused on building an AI-ready culture — a topic that has moved from speculative to urgent in less than two years.
Brenner’s perspective is grounded in a practical truth: AI is reshaping roles, workflows, and skill requirements at a pace that outstrips most companies’ ability to retrain their people. The technology itself is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is whether an organisation’s culture supports the trust, data literacy, flexibility, and change management that AI adoption demands. Without those cultural prerequisites, even the most advanced tools gather dust or generate resistance.
What makes this session relevant to the broader cultural transformation conversation is the emphasis on keeping human abilities central. An AI-ready culture does not mean an AI-dominated culture. It means creating an environment where people feel empowered — not threatened — to use new tools effectively. That requires psychological safety, transparent communication about how roles will evolve, and a genuine investment in upskilling.
P&G’s scale gives Brenner a unique lens. When you are enabling cultural transformation across a global workforce of tens of thousands, there is no room for vague aspirations. The playbook has to be specific, repeatable, and embedded in everyday management practices.
Behaviors Over Slogans: Embedding Culture Into Everyday Decisions
If van Bijsterveld provides the formula and Brenner provides the technology lens, Johanna Hummer delivers the execution layer. As VP and Global Head of People Success at Opella, Hummer will share how the company is embedding a challenger culture — not through posters on walls or inspirational slogans, but through clearly defined behaviors that drive accountability, engagement, and performance during a major organisational transformation.
The distinction matters enormously. Most organisations can articulate their values. Far fewer can point to specific behaviors that translate those values into everyday decisions, leadership practices, and operating rhythms. Hummer’s approach at Opella closes that gap. When you define what “challenger” looks like in a Monday morning team meeting, a quarterly review, or a product launch decision, you move culture from abstraction to action.
This is where cultural transformation becomes tangible. Opella’s model connects desired behaviors directly to measurable business outcomes — proving that when leaders model the right behaviors consistently, alignment improves, execution accelerates, and people feel a sense of ownership rather than compliance. It is a people strategy that refuses to separate “how we work” from “what we deliver.”
For HR leaders wrestling with the gap between stated culture and lived culture, Hummer’s session offers a blueprint for bridging it.
Joint the Conversation in Porto
The HR World Summit 2026 is where these ideas move from insight to action. If you are an HR leader, CHRO, or people strategist committed to driving cultural transformation in your organisation, this is the room you need to be in.
Cultural transformation will not wait for the next planning cycle. The organisations that act now are the ones that will define the next decade.
