Your Culture Can't Change Until Your Incentives Do

Picture this: You're running a 115-year-old property company. You have a strong culture. You have traditions. You have ways of doing things that have worked for more than a century. And now your leadership is saying: "We need to innovate. We need to move faster. We need to become more entrepreneurial."

So you create a new team. You give them a mandate. You tell them to "make innovation easier for everybody." And then you wonder why it's like pushing a boulder uphill.

The problem isn't that your company can't change. The problem is that you're asking it to change while maintaining all the things that made it successful in the first place.

I recently talked with Anthony Liu, who leads the New Ventures team at Swire Properties—a massive Hong Kong-based property developer with operations across Asia. Swire has been around forever. They move slowly, methodically, thoughtfully. They hold their properties long-term. They focus on transformation, not quick flips. And that's actually a solid business. But it also means the organization is built for long-term thinking and careful decision-making, not rapid experimentation.

Anthony was brought in with a simple mandate: Make innovation easier. But here's what he quickly discovered—you can't bolt innovation onto an existing culture. You have to work with what's already there. And you have to understand that culture isn't something you change by decree. Culture is the sum of every incentive, every ritual, every unspoken rule.

Big Companies Aren't Broken. They're Just Built for Something Else

Here's the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to hear: Big companies aren't inherently bad at innovation. They're not incompetent. They're not stupid. They're just optimized for something different.

A 115-year-old property company isn't built to move fast. It's built to last. It's built to make decisions carefully. It's built to think long-term. Those are strengths. Those are features, not bugs. And if you actually want to be innovative inside that structure, you have to acknowledge what you're working with instead of pretending you can turn it into something else.

Anthony started by asking a simple question: What is our culture actually good at?

Swire's culture, historically, was about taking big ideas and transforming them into reality. Visionary. Ambitious. Long-term thinking. These are the things in the DNA. So instead of trying to kill the culture and replace it with a "move fast and break things" startup mentality, Anthony thought about how to infuse those core strengths into how innovation happened.

That shift changes everything. You're not fighting the culture anymore. You're working with it.

The Three Things Holding Back Your Innovation

Anthony's team conducted extensive research before launching New Ventures. They interviewed people across the company. They asked: What's stopping you from trying new things? What are the barriers?

Three themes emerged immediately. First: time. People are too busy. They have jobs. They have existing responsibilities. They don't have time to explore risky new things on top of their normal work.

Second: knowledge. They don't know where to start. A facilities manager knows facilities management. They don't know anything about sensor technology or AI or robotics. The knowledge gap feels too big to cross.

Third: money. Even for cheap experiments, they don't have budget. Their budget is allocated at the beginning of the year. If they didn't plan to spend money on an experiment, they literally can't spend it. The finance system won't allow it.

This is the thing that kills innovation in big companies. Not risk aversion. Not cultural resistance. Just... friction. The system makes it too hard.

And here's the clever part: Once Anthony identified these three barriers, he designed his entire innovation program around removing them. He didn't create some grand innovation initiative with vague values. He created a system that solved specific problems.

How to Actually Get People to Try New Things

Most companies approach innovation like this: Create a vision. Announce the vision. Hope people get excited and start innovating. When they don't, act confused.

Anthony approached it differently. He created a four-step innovation pipeline that directly addressed the three barriers.

Step one: Study. A department comes to New Ventures with a problem or opportunity. Anthony's team researches it. They define the scope. They figure out what success looks like. The department doesn't have to do this—New Ventures does it for them. Barrier removed: knowledge.

Step two: Source. New Ventures goes out into the market—worldwide if necessary—and finds solutions. Could be a startup product. Could be an off-the-shelf solution. Could be something custom-built. They source options and bring them back. Barrier removed: knowledge, and partially time.

Step three: Trial. This is where it gets genius. New Ventures has a dedicated fund for experiments. They fund the trial directly. The department doesn't have to have budgeted for it. They don't have to justify it upfront. They can try something for free. This is massive. Barrier removed: money and time.

Step four: Adopt. If it works, the department takes it on long-term. New Ventures' job is to help them scale it. And the key metric? Not how many things they launch. But how many trials convert to actual adoption. Because launching things nobody uses isn't innovation. It's theater.

In three years, Anthony's team ran forty-six implementations across seventeen business units. About 25% didn't work out. But the beauty is: That's fine. Those 25% are learning opportunities. You understand why something failed and you adjust.

But here's the part that most companies miss: This system only works because Anthony understood the culture. He didn't try to change the culture. He worked with it. The company values long-term thinking? Good—his metrics are about adoption and impact, not speed. The company values careful decision-making? Good—his process includes research and validation before big commitments. The company has strong departmental structures? Good—he made sure to build trust within each department before asking them to try something new.

The Secret That Everyone Overlooks

About two years into New Ventures, Anthony realized something crucial: The product wasn't the technology. The product was internal communication.

They completely rethought their comms campaign. Instead of relying on company-wide emails that get lost in the noise, they did targeted communications. They held events. They brought in speakers to talk about technology trends. They created newsletters specifically designed to explain what New Ventures was doing and why it mattered. They produced videos.

Why does this matter? Because people didn't understand what New Ventures was actually doing. Some thought it was an incubator for external startups. Some thought it was a venture capital fund. Some didn't know it existed at all.

You can have the best system in the world. But if nobody knows about it, nobody uses it. And in a big company, internal communication is harder than external marketing. You're competing with thousands of emails, hundreds of meetings, dozens of competing priorities.

Anthony and his team realized that they had to be almost aggressive about their messaging. Direct newsletters. Owned channels. Events they controlled. Messages they controlled. Because if you let your message get filtered through company comms, it gets diluted. It gets reframed. It gets lost.

The Relationship Before the Pitch

Anthony said something that probably applies to anyone trying to move anything forward inside a large organization: Don't focus on the tech. Focus on the relationship.

When he meets with a department head, he doesn't lead with "Here's what we can do for you." He leads with "How are you doing? What are you working on? What's keeping you up at night?" He builds a relationship first. The pitch comes later. And it's a much softer pitch because it's rooted in understanding their actual needs.

This is the opposite of how most innovation teams operate. They come in with a presentation about innovation. They talk about the framework. They talk about their process. And people tune out because it's not about them—it's about you and your program.

Anthony flipped that. It's about them. Always. The technology is just a tool to help them succeed.

Why This Matters Beyond Real Estate

If you work in a large organization—any large organization—you're living with the same problem. You have departments. You have budgets set annually. You have approval processes. You have people who are busy with their existing jobs. And you're asking them to make time for innovation.

The question isn't: "How do I change the culture?" The question is: "How do I work with the culture to make change possible?"

Most organizations get this backwards. They see the culture as the obstacle and try to bulldoze through it. That creates resistance. That creates resentment. That kills anything you're trying to do.

But if you work with it? If you understand what's valuable about the existing culture and amplify those things? If you remove friction points instead of trying to change people's minds? Suddenly things move.

What Actually Works in the Real World

Based on Anthony's experience, here are the things that actually get innovation to stick in a big company:

First, remove barriers, don't lecture people. Don't tell people to be more entrepreneurial. Give them time, money, and knowledge. Do that and people will try things.

Second, communicate more than you think is necessary. In a big company, your message will get lost. Design for that. Owned channels. Repeated messages. Events. Direct communication. Assume you need to say something ten times before people actually hear it.

Third, build relationships before pitches. Understand what people actually need. Make sure your innovation helps them succeed, not just helps your team succeed.

Fourth, measure adoption, not launches. How many experiments actually made it into long-term use? That's your real metric. Everything else is noise.

Fifth, work with the existing culture. Don't try to change it. Find the valuable parts and lean into them. In Swire's case, that was long-term thinking and careful decision-making. Those aren't bad things. They're just things that need structure around them to enable faster experimentation.

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Want the Full Story?

If you want to hear Anthony's full framework for how he builds an innovation program inside a 115-year-old property company—including how he uses internal communications, how he builds relationships across departments, and how he measures success in a way that actually matters—listen to his full conversation on The School of Innovation podcast.

Yaniv Corem's interview with Anthony Liu goes deep into the pragmatic, relationship-based approach to corporate innovation. It's forty minutes of someone who actually understands that you can't copy Silicon Valley culture into an established organization. You have to build something that works for who you actually are.

Because here's the thing about culture change: It doesn't happen from decree. It doesn't happen from training programs. It happens when you create systems that make new behavior easier than old behavior. When you remove friction. When you build understanding instead of forcing change. Anthony gets this. And that's why New Ventures actually works at Swire—not despite the company's existing culture, but because he figured out how to work with it instead of against it.