Working with a place right now that wants to get more of its content into Strategy+Business, so periodically I look at said site and see what content they have just to see if I could help create something that might resonate for them. I was over there just now and came across this article on culture vs. strategy, which is pretty good. Literally every business hustler under the sun attributes the “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” deal to Peter Drucker, but it wasn’t actually him. It seems like it comes from much later — some dude named Mark Fields, who was high-up at Ford Motor at the time. Drucker is still a smart dude; check this out on results vs. goals as far as profits go.
In my eight years of off-task blogging about work, I have considered the culture vs. strategy argument any number of times. I don’t know if I’ve ever explicitly written about it, but whatever.
My answer would be: culture wins. I don’t know if it “eats” strategy, but I think it beats strategy. Now let’s break it down a little bit more.
Issue 1: “Culture” is a very amorphous term. It’s a suitcase word; carries a lot of different meanings for different people. As a result, executives tend to almost use it as a weapon, because they know it’s so vague and all-encompassing that they can just plop the word “culture” into discussions and it seems like they’re being “people-first,”…
