Culture Eats Strategy

Peter Drucker famously said that Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. It's takes consistent and ongoing efforts to build culture and align people with the core values of a company culture. Culture is comprised of agreed upon values, how people work together and communicate, clear focus on delivering real value to customers and a shared understanding of the company's mission and how to execute it. Regular and repeated communication about these values helps everyone in the company integrate them into the way they work.

When I was CEO at Issuu, until the company was 50 or so people, I met individually with each employee, no matter their title or role, to talk through ten key questions that helped us align. Just as importantly, hearing people's answers or how they struggled to answer these questions helped me understand where I needed to be more clear in how I and the leadership team articulated our vision, goals and kind of organization we are and wanted to be, especially as we scaled. These questions can be tailored to your own organization, and can be used with much larger organizations, with manager's replacing the CEO in the 1:1.

I shared the questions with everyone in the company and then starting about 10 days later, scheduled 1:1s with each person to have them share their answers in a deck or some kind of presentation. This helped everyone prepare and take increased ownership and accountability and have the space to ask questions where lack of clarity existed. It created a way for everyone to be heard and for me to listen. That listening created space for new ideas and creative solutions to surface. All of these questions are purposely open ended , available to be interpreted in different ways in order to maximize input and ideas.

?What are the 3 most important components of a company culture for you?

Most people were more or less in agreement with this answer. Sometimes, I would get a surprising answer or idea. The answers to this question helped us refine our own culture and prioritize how to align our values with the business plan.

?What is Issuu?

Most companies have a clear definition of what they do and how, but the business and ecosystem evolve. Hearing how each person on the team positions the company or delivers their own "elevator pitch," can change depending on their current focus or the market. For instance, in the current environment, developments in AI are happening so fast, that a company mandate, or at least how it's presented and explained, can change. At a minimum, the answer to this question helps clarify how to think about your company in the context of how the market is evolving.

?What is your vision for Issuu?

The beauty of this question is that it helps to clarify if people are aligned around the opportunity, the other players in the ecosystem and the value we deliver to customers. It also helps to unify people around how their day to day job contributes to the hopefully massive opportunity available.

?What is Issuu’s business model now and in 12 months?

This helped clarify and expandds our current go to market plan and also began to collect ideas and opportunities that we might not have in the plan. It also started to introduce new potential products and offerings to make available to our customers. Often in a company, we get so focused on the immediate price points or offerings, that we miss even more effective ways to drive go to market.

?3 things we do now that? you like

Answers to this often revolved around company culture. There were also great comments about the product, how we interact with customers and ways we reward and acknowledge people's contributions.

?3 things we do now that you’d like changed

Answers here helped us get a pulse on what people wanted to see change. Many were new and great ideas that were easy to implement. Even those that weren't easy to implement, provided insight into challenges that needed to be addressed or highlighted areas were there was strong disagreement on culture, communication or work styles.

?3 things/ideas we should make a priority

This helped people explore our ecosystem, product offering, competitor's offering and how the market is responding to our product and how we communicate it. The answers here were mostly product focused, but also included ways of operating, such as prioritizing a certain coding language, for the sake of efficiency, over the disparate languages that might have been used before

?3 most important developments in our ecosystem

This is something worth revisiting repeatedly. It encourages responsiveness to the market and highlights the importance of awareness beyond our own product or how it's used. Customers never use just one product in their operations. They use us in association with other products. At Issuu, we were used with the likes of Canva, Adobe, Microsoft, Hubspot, Shopify and others. Having clarity about what is happening outside of our "walls" helped us serve our customers better.

?In 3 years what does success look like?

This doesn't mean we're done in three years. It's about aligning day to day tasks and activities with the larger mission and opportunity of the company. Most companies have monthly, quarterly and annual targets and goals. These are important to retain focus and limit distractions. And we want to tie them to the bigger picture. What does success really look like? To what is each incremental release, and milestone contributing? We want to have our eyes on the day to day, while being clear about where we're going. Even at more than $2 billion of revenue and 200 million active users, Canva is famous for saying we're only 1% done. So this is a question to keep asking as we grow.

?If we could acquire one company, what would it be?

I loved the answers to this question. We'd learn about new competitors, or potential partners. In some instances, it would give insight into people's sense of ambition for us as a company. Some folks struggled with this, but it was a question that expanded how employees saw us and the opportunities available to us. Answers to this question literally led to partnerships and ways to expand our impact.

In all, some of the questions were challenging. Some folks that were less involved in the day to day business would often say, I don't know what our business model will be in a year. That's for the go to market team to decide or they might say they were stumped on the question about who we should acquire. And Answering these questions, helped everyone connect the dots from their day to day responsibilities to the larger ecosystem in which we operated and in turn enabled them to make more informed responsive decisions in their day to day work. Using these questions or forms of them across a company's lifecycle, no matter the size, helps align culture, accountability and impact and ultimately serves as the foundation for great success.