Strategy eats culture for breakfast (63)
Kim Warren 
It's a popular slogan "culture eats strategy" for breakfast - but there's no case where a great culture makes a bad strategy successful.
Given all the hard work that true experts put into building powerful solutions to strategy challenges, it is truly depressing how easily folk are seduced by sexy-sounding slogans.
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Over the many years, we have been told that our strategic performance would be transformed by “creative destruction”, “blue-ocean strategy”, exploiting “tipping points”, a great “net promoter score”, building “core competences”. Some, like the last of these, have grains of truth and utility to them. But no such recipe comes close to providing a comprehensive solution. And some are just plain dangerous.
(I still recall the CEO of a large insurance company explaining at a strategy conference how their “blue ocean” strategy would transform their future – yet today they are still battling it out in the same old “red oceans” they were always in, and doing OK at that)
The big untruth
But there are few more outrageous examples of slogan-nonsense than one of the best-known of all – “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Implying of course that strategy work is a waste of time.
This is normally attributed to Peter Drucker, but I am told it is not in fact down to him!
So two questions for you:
- What explains the endless cases of sustained success achieved by organisations with truly appalling cultures, if that success is not due having a strong strategy?
- Can anyone share with us a single case of an organisation with a bad strategy that achieved sustained success because of a great culture?
Sure, a bad culture may undermine an otherwise promising strategy, but the many counter-cases suggest that “culture” is something less than a hygiene factor – helpful, but far from essential.
It’s ironic, I guess, that we could more justifiably make precisely the opposite claim:
Strategy eats Culture for breakfast !
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Categories: : business performance, strategy
