"Culture eats strategy for breakfast!"

Nom nom nom.
Chewy this brekkie.
Is it pork?
No, it’s strategy.
Yummy, strategy!

But why is culture so hungry for strategy at the crack of dawn?

What’s wrong with lunchies or din din?

No.

Strategy is your Full English Breakfast and that’s that.

Oh Mr. Peter Drucker what have you done now

Actually hold on! 🤔

It looks like Peter may not be the coiner of this aphorism.

According to this answer on Quora.

And I concur with Mr. Anders (who BTW is one of our contributors this week): “It's better to be approximately right than precisely wrong” - yessir!

So let’s break this meal down into chewie chunks:

Strategy = the action plan to hit a chosen target.

Your company culture = the sum of all behaviours, customs, ideas and how those things are valued in your business.*

*I think this is far more true than saying:
Your company culture is solely defined by your values. 

With all good intentions of aspiring to a certain behaviour, if your team is not behaving that way, your culture has a different value set to the one you are longing for.

**On that note, I highly recommend you read this company culture gem:

What You Do, Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz.

So if culture eats strategy, then that implies there is a scenario where culture exists in absence of strategy.

But can you really have a company culture without a strategy?

No, not really.

If a company has no strategy, it would probably be very hard for it to exist.

That can be as simple as:
We produce bottled water and sell those to thirsty people.

That’s a strategy.

And as long as a group of people get together to produce those bottles and sell them, you’ll have some form of culture with a loose strategy.

Yes yes, I hear ya!

Dan, you’re taking things too literal again.

Perhaps what it’s really saying is that you can have a strategy in place, but if you don’t have the right culture required to achieve the end goal of that strategy, success is as unobtainable as The One Ring.

I would say it’s good to have a vision.

Important to have a mission.

And most important to have a strategy.

It’s that strategy that will inform the ideas, customs, behaviours and ranking of values that will ultimately impact what your culture is like.

So culture and strategy cannot be mutually exclusive.

To me this aphorism is a little bullshitty.

But, as always this is not about forcing my steamy soup down your throat.

Let’s hear it from our contributors this week…