“Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.” - Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
“As common as spitting in the grate” - My mum after my dad put HP sauce on his dover sole.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Which makes strategy bacon. Which fits in well because strategy typically pairs with eggsecution. But that makes culture me. Which is obviously incorrect as HP sauce on a dover sole rampant is my heraldic crest. What’s cultured? And breakfasty? Well, yogurt obviously. Paper wraps stone. Stone blunts scissors. Yogurt eats bacon. That’s just the inexorable mechanics of a logic as cold as a glass of orange juice.
Peter Drucker once said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Or maybe it was Dwayne The Rock Johnson. The research on this is unclear and it is easy to confuse the two. What does this mean though? In 1985, noted organizational theorist Edgar H Schein wrote
More and more management consultants are recognizing these types of problems and are noting explicitly that, because “culture constrains strategy,” a company must analyze its culture and learn to manage within its boundaries or, if necessary, change it.
This comment strikes me as being uncontroversial. Culture is part of an organization’s infrastructure. It is how things get done around here. It also ties in to risk appetite, enterpreneurship, collaboration, and competition. There is no point predicating a strategy on vertigo sufferers becoming bunjee jumpers. However some go further:
“The fact is, culture eats strategy for lunch,” (Merck CEO Richard Clark) told World Business. “You can have a good strategy in place, but if you don’t have the culture and the enabling systems that allow you to successfully implement that strategy, the culture of the organization will defeat the strategy.”
This comments begs the question: How can it be a good strategy if it doesn’t take into account the cultural capabilities of the organization? Surely a strategy that only works with enabling systems that are not actually in place in the organization is a bad strategy? Is my strategy to be a Formula 1 driver while owning a Honda Civic actually a winning strategy?
Strategy belle-news-lettrist (and hipster barbershop photo model) JP Castlin expounded on strategy and culture yesterday. Go off and read it. I mostly agree with it. But I want to push Castlin’s point on the complementarity of strategy and culture a little further.
What both strategy and culture share is that they are both profoundly misunderstood by managers and ultimately evade and exceed the traditional tools of management. Managers set goals, secure resources, direct staff, monitor progress, and report upwards. There is work to be done and there are problems to be analyzed and solved.
Strategy is problematic because analysis will only get you so far. You are making hypotheses and bets about the future - which is more or less unknowable. Yes there are better and worse ways of strategizing but ultimately there is no process that you can follow that will guarantee you a successful strategy. Managers deal with this anxiety in a number of ways:
They try to analyze their way out. Strategy becomes planning which in turn becomes budgeting. At its worst, reality is turned on its head and budgeting drives strategy. The outcome of this is that you end up with gigabytes of spreadsheets and macros but no real understanding of where you are, where you should go, and what you will likely encounter along the way.
They fall back on mysticism and fiction. There is a workshop at a leadership off-site where a vision, mission statement, values, and objectives are drafted. These may include lofty references to making the world a better place and the importance of collaboration, integrity, innovation, and a vow to be customer-centric at all times. These will be placed on the company website where they can be more honour'd in the breach than the observance.
Above all, strategy must be formulated by the leadership at the top and then brought down from the mountain top on two tablets of stone to the rabble below. Nevermind that all strategies are at least partially wrong. There can be no show of weakness.
Meanwhile culture is this thing. It’s out there. It’s how things get done but it is invisible (like a Predator in the jungle cloaking itself, like an Alien in the shadows of the ship). What gets measured gets managed and culture is a nightmare to measure. It is slippery and intractable. At least managers can pretend that they can own strategy.
So what do managers do?
Firstly they pretend that culture can be engineered with value statements and KPI targets in performance reviews. Culture will be tamed. Meaning making will be mechanized. Culture is survey results on a Lickert scale.
Culture is poorly defined and amorphous. Yes it’s behaviour and what people say and what they don’t say, and what they do, and what they say they don’t do and then do anyway. It may even not be one thing but many things. A swarm just out of visual range. My name is Legion.
Secondly, as with any boogeyman, they treat it as a scapegoat. Why did this initiative fail? The culture rejected it. The culture blocked change. It was the Culture what killed the Strategy. I never touched nothing, guvnor.
For managers, Strategy and Culture are monstrous. Asking which will win is like asking who would win in a fight between an Alien and a Predator. But what’s most important is that the monsters fight each other rather than notice lil ol you.
Managers do not need to be afraid of either strategy or culture.
The first step is to acknowledge that you do not stand outside of strategy or culture. You are part of the cultures. You are part of the strategy.
Next that you cannot control strategy or culture.
But you can influence them. Your decisions, your words, your actions matter. As you exist within them.
This game does not stop. There is is no final, winning strategy. It is an infinite game. The cultures do not freeze in time. They interact with each other and with the outside world. They die and are reborn as people leave and join your organization.
So if your Culture can eat you Strategy, that doesn’t say much for either. And it doesn’t say much for you. You need a proper breakfast to sort you out. Not just a double espresso of heroic leadership and a microdose of KPI dashboard psychotropics. Some strategy bacon with a dollop of yogurt culture. That’ll set you right.
Castlin: "culture is often perceived to be under the company’s control; it is about us, not them." What I've experienced within orgs, many times, is someone in a group - and it can be any group from the exec team, to a middle management leadership team, to an actual team - stating that "the culture" of the org is something outside of the speaker. The speaker is not responsible for the heinous acts of "the culture", and so bears no personal responsibility for taking action (although nebulous others do - usually people who aren't in the room at the time). It is also implied that the speaker should be lauded for their wisdom in pointing out this fundamental truth.
Drives me nuts.