Jack Truong on Keeping Performance Central When Culture Wars Hit the Workplace

When workplace culture debates erupt—whether over remote work policies, DEI initiatives, or generational divides—most executives find themselves caught between competing constituencies. Jack Truong took a different approach during his tenures transforming 3M’s office products division, Electrolux’s North American operations, and James Hardie Industries: he redirected every cultural discussion back to numbers that mattered.

“We always focused these culture debates/changes on how they would improve on the reduction of safety incidents, overall sales growth, and profit growth,” Truong said. “If the direct effects are not measurable and shown on the actual results of safety and financial performance of the organization then it does not matter.”

This methodology isn’t about dismissing culture. Truong has written extensively about how corporate culture determines long-term performance. Rather, it’s about ensuring cultural initiatives serve business outcomes instead of existing as separate tracks.

Three Metrics That Settled Arguments

At each company Truong led, he established three anchors for evaluating any cultural proposal: safety incident rates, sales trajectory, and profit margins. These weren’t theoretical commitments. At James Hardie, where he served as CEO from 2018 to 2021, the company’s market capitalization grew by more than $13 billion during his tenure—an increase of 370%—while organic annual revenue rose 45% and net profits jumped 85%.

The framework worked because it moved conversations from abstractions to evidence. Teams couldn’t simply argue that a cultural change “felt right” or aligned with prevailing sentiment. They needed to demonstrate connection to one of the three performance indicators.

What happened when cultural initiatives couldn’t meet that standard? Truong let them go, regardless of how fashionable they might be. His threshold wasn’t whether an idea enjoyed popular support but whether it delivered measurable improvement in safety or financial results.

One Policy That Ended Siloed Thinking

Truong identified a single compensation structure that reliably refocused fractured teams on shared objectives: tying bonuses and performance ratings to cross-functional outcomes rather than individual or departmental success.

“Tie bonus and performance ratings to the success of the cross-functional team,” Truong explained. “It drives accountability to the team to ensure having the right team spirit and collaboration to do the right thing (improving business financial results and safety for all) vs just doing things right as a woke culture.”

This wasn’t subtle. When marketing’s bonus depended partly on manufacturing’s safety record, or when engineering’s rating incorporated sales results, the incentive structure forced collaboration. Teams couldn’t optimize their own metrics while ignoring broader organizational performance.

The approach addressed what Truong has described as workplaces’ most corrosive dynamic: departmental silos where groups “vie to outdo one another rather than working together toward a common goal that benefits everyone,” as he noted on his website. Once compensation reflected team success, territorial behavior became expensive.

Why Measurement Kills Ideology

Truong’s insistence on measurable outcomes serves a particular function: it eliminates purely ideological positioning. When every cultural proposal must demonstrate impact on safety, sales, or profits, advocates can’t rely solely on moral arguments or demographic appeals.

This doesn’t mean rejecting initiatives that address legitimate workplace concerns. It means those initiatives must deliver results beyond making certain groups feel validated. A diversity program, for instance, would need to show how it improved team performance or reduced safety incidents—not simply that it increased representation numbers.

The discipline extends to how Truong evaluates success. He doesn’t assess cultural changes based on employee sentiment surveys or participation rates. He tracks whether safety incidents declined, whether sales accelerated, whether profit margins expanded. If the numbers moved favorably, the initiative warranted continuation. If not, it didn’t.

Performance as Common Language

What Truong’s methodology accomplishes is establishing performance data as the shared vocabulary for cultural discussions. When executives anchor debates to safety incidents, sales growth, and profits, they create criteria that transcend individual values or political leanings.

This proved particularly valuable at Electrolux, where Truong inherited a company whose North American division had flatlined at $4.2 billion in revenue with declining profits. Truong’s first meeting with global leadership set the tone: “There’s no such thing as a mature market, there’s only mature business managers.”

He then rebuilt the division around a strategy emphasizing design simplicity and aesthetics over technological complexity. Sales doubled. The company became the second-largest home appliance manufacturer in North America. Cultural resistance to the new direction couldn’t sustain itself once results materialized.

The Limitation of Pure Measurement

Truong’s framework has a built-in constraint: it only addresses aspects of workplace culture that affect measurable performance. Some cultural issues—how people treat each other in daily interactions, whether certain groups feel respected, the tone of internal communications—don’t necessarily show up in safety statistics or quarterly earnings.

His approach doesn’t resolve those tensions. It sidesteps them by insisting that whatever cultural changes the organization pursues must demonstrate connection to business outcomes. Questions that can’t be answered through safety records, sales figures, or profit statements fall outside the methodology’s scope.

This limitation is also the framework’s power. It prevents cultural debates from consuming organizational energy on matters unrelated to the company’s core mission. Truong isn’t trying to arbitrate every workplace dispute—he’s ensuring that the disputes the organization invests resources in addressing are ones that affect performance.

What Survives the Numbers Test

After three decades leading major corporate transformations, Truong has observed which cultural initiatives consistently demonstrate measurable value. They share common characteristics: they reduce friction between departments, they accelerate decision-making, they align individual incentives with collective goals, they make information flow more efficiently.

None of these require sophisticated diversity consultants or lengthy sensitivity training. Most involve straightforward structural changes—altering how bonuses are calculated, establishing cross-functional project teams, requiring departments to share performance data, making strategic priorities explicit and repeating them frequently.

The approach won’t satisfy those who believe workplace culture should address broader social objectives beyond business performance. But for executives managing organizations where culture wars threaten to derail operational focus, Truong’s methodology offers a clear alternative: acknowledge the debates, then redirect attention to whether proposed changes will reduce safety incidents, grow sales, and expand profits. If they won’t, move on.