Q&A: Scaling Up Culture Change

When Paul Spiegelman created the job of chief culture officer at Stericycle three years ago, he was beginning a multiyear experiment. Could the corporate culture he had created and nurtured at his own company scale to fit a publicly traded company with a $12.5 billion market cap?

Mr. Spiegelman ran BerylHealth, a health care call-center company he founded, for 27 years. When he sold it in 2012 to Stericycle, a highly diversified health care services company, the more straightforward job of growing his call-center business within the larger parent did not interest him. But Stericycle’s culture was a blank slate, perfect for Mr. Spiegelman’s culture-building ambitions.

IQ interviewed Mr. Spiegelman—the author of three books about corporate culture—to find out what he has done, how he has done it and the results he has seen at Stericycle.