Define the corporate culture of RBC using the models presented in Chapter 7. The capital gained from culture By Bernard Simon in Toronto Gordon Nixon makes a point of escaping Canada’s frigid winter each January for a Caribbean cruise. But the excursion is more work than pleasure for Royal Bank of Canada’s chief executive. His 700 fellow passengers are RBC tellers, administrative staff, junior employees and middle managers who are being rewarded for superior performance.

Mr. Nixon joins the cruises to put into practice the teamwork and mutual respect he has tried to foster among RBC’s 73,000 employees in eight years at the helm of Canada’s biggest bank. As he sees it, that culture has played a crucial role in RBC’s ability – rivalled by only a handful of other large banks – to ride out the storms that have battered the financial services industry during the past two years. ‘We don’t tolerate fiefdoms and so forth,’ Mr. Nixon says. ‘Those are the sort of things that brought down a lot of organizations.’