---
title: "Episode 8: Lasting Cultural Change"
show: "Family Wealth & Legacy"
host: Mark Haynes Daniell
episode_number: 8
element: Family Dynamics & Communication
duration: 12 min
url: https://create.podmark.de/family-wealth-podcast?ep=8
markdown_url: https://create.podmark.de/family-wealth-podcast/episode-8.md
overview_url: https://create.podmark.de/family-wealth-podcast.md
type: podcast_episode
language: en
intended_audience: AI agents, LLMs, search crawlers
---

# Episode 8: Lasting Cultural Change

> How to understand and reshape your family's culture to build a lasting legacy.

## Summary

Mark Haynes Daniell explores why culture shapes who a family is, where it comes from, and where it is going. He offers a practical framework for moving beyond short-term behaviour change to the beliefs and attitudes that drive lasting cultural transformation.

## Chapters

- [0:00](https://create.podmark.de/family-wealth-podcast?ep=8&t=0s) Introduction and why culture matters
- [1:01](https://create.podmark.de/family-wealth-podcast?ep=8&t=61s) What is culture and where it comes from
- [2:39](https://create.podmark.de/family-wealth-podcast?ep=8&t=159s) How culture manifests in a family
- [3:54](https://create.podmark.de/family-wealth-podcast?ep=8&t=234s) Beliefs, attitudes and behaviours hierarchy
- [6:21](https://create.podmark.de/family-wealth-podcast?ep=8&t=381s) Managing good values and bad values
- [7:54](https://create.podmark.de/family-wealth-podcast?ep=8&t=474s) Four attributes of winning cultures
- [10:01](https://create.podmark.de/family-wealth-podcast?ep=8&t=601s) The stop, start, continue exercise

## Key takeaways

- Culture shapes who a family is, where it came from, and where it is going, and it ultimately trumps strategy.
- Lasting change requires moving up the hierarchy from behaviours to attitudes to fundamental beliefs.
- Families should not only celebrate good values but actively manage and eradicate bad ones.
- Winning cultures in turbulence are externally focused, long-term, fast and flexible, and dissatisfied with the status quo.
- A simple stop, start, continue chart is a practical first step toward improving family culture.

**Keywords:** family culture, cultural change, values and virtues, beliefs and attitudes, family legacy, family strategy, behaviour change, family identity

## Full transcript

Timestamps in square brackets mark the second the sentence starts.

[0:00] Hello, and welcome to this podcast series on family wealth and legacy strategy. My name is
[0:06] Mark Haynes-Daniel. I'm the founder and chairman of the Raffles Family Wealth Trust, a boutique
[0:11] advisory business based in Singapore and London, working with legacies around the world on their
[0:17] family strategic, transitional, business, and other matters related to their greater enterprise.
[0:24] Today's topic, as part of that strategic discussion, is making lasting cultural change.
[0:30] And it's an extraordinarily important topic because culture affects who we are, who we think we are, what we do, how we do it, where we go,
[0:41] and a lot of elements that underline what a family is, what it wants to be, where it's come from, the challenges it faces,
[0:49] and the strategic changes that need to be made on a cultural basis to move the family forward
[0:55] in the best possible direction to create the best possible strategic future for your family
[1:01] and all of its members, even those yet unborn. So what is culture? Culture is the unique
[1:07] multi-dimensional foundation to our lives, which shapes how we think, how we act, how we relate to
[1:15] other people and where we go and why we go there. So it's a very complicated phenomenon. The sources
[1:22] of culture are very wide and very deep. They come from our nationality, religion, family histories,
[1:31] languages, jobs we have, caste, class, tribe, other sources of identity which shape a common set of
[1:42] values, a common approach to life, and a common expectation of roles, rights, and responsibilities
[1:49] that we all have within different cultures. So it affects our political views, our family views,
[1:56] our business views, and is something that for a lot of people is a bit difficult to understand
[2:01] and therefore not specifically addressed when it's one of the most important things to think about.
[2:06] So there are common sets of sources of culture and also unique ones. One particular experience, good or bad, can change a family's views on very important matters, which is fresh to the current generation. So understanding what culture is and how it can be managed is really, really important, both as reaction to events, reflecting history, and trying to shape the future.
[2:33] and one of the things that's unusual about culture is it manifests itself in different ways
[2:39] and for some reasons a lot of i don't understand which ones uh the words that capture how a culture
[2:45] appears in a family all end in the letters ate eight like how people communicate how they
[2:51] relegate how they relate how they cultivate how they promulgate how they allocate time money
[2:58] resources, how they compensate people, what they celebrate. So all those things are manifestations
[3:04] and reflections of culture, and they contribute to culture, but they're not really what culture is.
[3:10] And they don't necessarily lead to a deep understanding of how to shape your culture
[3:15] for the best looking forward. And if you think about culture, I think one of the best sources
[3:22] is T.S. Eliot, the famous poet who was originally American, then came and lived in England.
[3:28] who wrote The Four Quartets, The Wasteland, lots of other famous poems.
[3:32] And he said he wrote on culture very specifically,
[3:35] saying that in England, culture reflects things like fish and chips and Brighton Beach
[3:40] and a lot of aspects of English history, the king, the queen.
[3:44] That's all part of English culture and needs to be taken into account
[3:47] if you think about managing culture and understanding culture in order to manage it.
[3:52] So culture is very complex.
[3:54] And when you really get down to how am I going to manage this in my own family,
[3:58] because it's so complicated. Having a simple structure may be quite useful. And that structure
[4:03] is one which is worked out in a number of different companies and by psychologists,
[4:07] which has a hierarchy of beliefs at the top, underneath that attitudes, and underneath that
[4:14] behaviors. And what we see is the behaviors that we just talked about can actually be affected. So
[4:20] going from the bottom up from behaviors to attitudes to beliefs. Behaviors can be affected by
[4:26] sanctions, punishments, rewards, but that's not long-term change. You can change short-term
[4:33] behavior, but you're not going to make long-term change unless you go further up that conceptual
[4:38] framework. Behaviors are a product of attitudes. I don't like to work. I don't like social
[4:44] engagements. And those attitudes, if you can change those attitudes, then you can change the
[4:50] behaviors more easily. Changing attitudes can be done through therapy, through one-on-one
[4:56] engagements, through changing experiences, communicating differently. So the attitudes
[5:03] that are shaped by all our experiences can be, in fact, managed to precede changes in behaviors,
[5:14] which are very important. At the top of the hierarchy are the beliefs that people have.
[5:18] And people can believe that they are a troubled people. They believe in life should be celebrated. They believe life is fair. They believe life is unfair. But it's the fundamental beliefs that drive attitudes, that drive behaviors.
[5:33] So if you want to change behaviors, you have to move up to the top of that hierarchy to people, their fundamental beliefs, their religious beliefs, their national identity, their beliefs in optimism, pessimism, those aspects of large concepts that shape attitudes that in turn shape behaviors.
[5:53] So if you want to create a lasting change,
[5:56] that means really understanding what culture is,
[5:58] how it manifests itself,
[6:00] addressing particular behaviors that you want to change.
[6:02] If someone's behaving badly and communicating badly,
[6:05] you can deal with a punishment or a reward
[6:08] or an implied reward.
[6:11] Attitudes you can shape through individual activities
[6:13] or group activities,
[6:14] but the fundamental changes that are most lasting
[6:17] mean you need to get to the fundamental roots
[6:20] of a person's belief system
[6:21] and affect those. And there are two practical things you can do that can help you shape culture
[6:28] that are very much part of next practice rather than existing best practice or former best
[6:34] practice. And one of those is to think about culture as a product to a certain extent of
[6:40] values and that values are a product of culture. So if you look at values, most families look at
[6:46] the positive values. They're basically a list of virtues, unity, harmony, hard work, integrity,
[6:51] loyalty, all those abstract nouns that are quite aspirational are part of a family's
[6:59] constitution, shared values, etc. But if you really want to make change, you don't want to
[7:05] just celebrate those values. You want to manage bad values as well. There are seven virtues and
[7:11] seven vices in the human condition, the cardinal virtues and theological virtues. And in order to
[7:18] manage your life, you want to focus on and emphasize the virtues and behave according to
[7:25] those, which means understanding the vices and staying away from them. So like in any family,
[7:32] if you have good values and bad values, if you want to change the culture of the family,
[7:36] you want to focus on the good values and eradicate the bad values, another word that ends in eight,
[7:41] and do that in a way that's practical. And working with that mix is a very important part of
[7:48] tough-minded approach to families, their behaviors, and the improvement of behaviors
[7:54] through attitudes and beliefs for the long term. And a second part of culture that's worth thinking
[8:01] about are the elements of success for businesses and families that are applicable, particularly
[8:07] in times of turbulence, change, volatility, and difficulty. And those four values that have been
[8:13] proven by very large studies at the Harvard Business School, captured in work by Chris
[8:17] Zook at Bain & Company and other people, which show that there are four characteristics of winning
[8:22] companies in turbulence and change and challenge in their industries, which apply very well to
[8:27] families and their wealth and businesses also. And those four attributes of winning companies
[8:33] are all cultural. They don't have to do with leverage so much or asset allocation or organizational
[8:39] structure. They have to do the winners in all these times of turbulence at the end,
[8:44] all represented or reflected the same four laudable aspects of culture. They were external
[8:52] in their focus rather than internal. They were long-term in their approach rather than short-term.
[8:57] They were fast and flexible rather than slow and bureaucratic. And they were dissatisfied with the
[9:03] status quo instead of being satisfied with the status quo. So family cultures that are externally
[9:09] focused, long-term in thinking, fast and flexible, and dissatisfied with the status quo at a search
[9:15] for something better will create a platform based on the belief that you can do better,
[9:21] you can change yourself, you can help other people change themselves, both individually
[9:26] and collectively, to create something much better for the future. So culture does trump strategy.
[9:33] Culture is very complicated to understand, but can be managed. Culture is a very important part
[9:38] of strategy because it affects so much of how a family operates in its wealth structures,
[9:46] investment policies, philanthropy, relationships, ecosystems, family office, risk management.
[9:54] Culture is there everywhere. And understanding where it is, understanding what it is,
[9:59] understanding where it comes from, and putting in place approaches to manage it better can be
[10:05] an instrumental part of having the best possible future. One particular document you may want to
[10:10] think about producing is a three-column chart that says, what do I want? If I want to change my
[10:15] culture, what do I want to stop doing? What do I want to start doing? And what do I want to continue
[10:21] doing? So one simple piece of paper with three columns, stop, start, continue, with regard to
[10:28] the family culture and what works and what doesn't work, can be a very progressive first step
[10:34] toward the improvement of your family culture,
[10:38] the improvement in the quality of your legacy,
[10:41] and the improvement in the quality of the experience
[10:43] that people have within your family,
[10:45] which will make them want to contribute
[10:47] to their own families and the greater family
[10:49] to a much higher degree
[10:51] to the benefit of everyone concerned.
[10:53] So thank you for your attention.
[10:55] I hope you found that useful.
[10:56] If you'd like to hear more,
[10:58] please feel free,
[10:59] and we would very much appreciate it,
[11:01] if you would subscribe to this podcast,
[11:02] If you would visit our website, raffles, raffles trust.com, uh, you would contact us via LinkedIn.
[11:08] I'm on LinkedIn.
[11:10] And also at, uh, if you have the time, M H D at raffles trust.com is my email M H D for
[11:18] Mark Haynes, Danielle.
[11:20] I'm not sure I'll be able to get back to you, but I will, I will read and look at everything
[11:23] that comes in and appreciate your contributions to my understanding of how you think about
[11:29] this issue, what you may have done and what you would like to do, and how this message could be
[11:34] tailored for future audience to reflect your experiences, as well as the many decades of
[11:40] experience that I've had and my colleagues have had that have gone into this thinking,
[11:44] this understanding, and this practical approach for the future. Thank you very much,
[11:49] and I look forward to seeing you again soon.

## Source and limits

This transcript is the recorded wording of the episode, hosted by Mark Haynes Daniell. It is general framework and experience, not investment, legal or tax advice. Produced by Podmark.