CULTURE EATS STRATEGY

Peter Drucker had a famous quote in business that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” What does he mean by that?

It means that you can have the best strategy in the world to take your company or your idea forward but if the culture of the company is different or distinct from what the strategy is, that's going to win. And, that means that the culture really, really is important.

So, how do you affect that? How do you change that? How do you do something about that?

Well, it's very important that everybody in your company agree on a culture. It’s very important for the CEO to articulate what culture you want to have. I think it's best to have that culture derived as a group by having everybody participate. But, however, you derive it, whether it's solo coming from the CEO at the top or whether it's a group effort to determine it, it's very important that everybody understands what the culture is and one thing that's incredible is that the CEO, founder, might have their culture very clearly articulated in their own head but everybody else in the company can’t articulate it. Think about how that applies even to all the daily interactions of people in the company. You want people to be able to make decisions like you would if you want everybody to share the same culture.

Well, how do you get people to know what that is? Only through a lot of repetition, a lot of discussions, and a lot of sharing, a lot of scenario playing of what to do in different situations so that people can make smart decisions.

I really think that if you spend a lot of time talking about the culture of your company and listening and taking input from others and making sure you all agree on it; then you can have a situation with the strategy that you want to carry out your company can actually be executed because the culture will help make that succeed as a pulse as opposed to getting in its way.