Egbert Schram

Group CEO

Egbert Schram is a global authority on cultural analytics and the Group CEO of The Culture Factor Group. Growing up in the “new” city of Almere, a place that did not exist fifty years ago (it was water and still is a few meters below sea level). Being the first in his laborer-class family to attend university, Egbert developed an early awareness of how societies, institutions, and systems are consciously constructed. This awareness was further shaped by his years as a high-level football goalkeeper: a role defined by teamwork, yet marked by moments of deep individual responsibility and solitude.
 
Together, these experiences fuel his central motivation, making sense of work-life for people who feel increasingly disconnected by the abstract language and rituals of modern management.
 
Originally planning a career in the Dutch Marines, Egbert ultimately pivoted toward studying forest management and environmental psychology. This unconventional path gave him what he often describes as a “forester’s pragmatism”: a way of thinking that values ecosystems over silos, long-term resilience over short-term optimization, and observable behavior over slogans. Witnessing how corporate jargon can obscure operational reality, he began to frame culture not as a soft topic, but as the literal operating system of an organization, shaping how decisions are made, trade-offs are handled, and meaning is experienced at work.
 
Migrated from the Netherlands to Finland 20 years ago, today, Egbert leads a global organization active in more than sixty countries. Known as a delicate provocateur, he uses data to bridge the gap between executive intent and the lived experience of employees, challenging leaders to see how their own behaviors silently reinforce or undermine the systems they seek to change.
 
He is the author of Navigating Foreignerness and is currently working on a forthcoming book that applies principles from natural resource management to organizational change, inviting leaders to think less like engineers, and more like stewards, of the human systems they lead.