On "Culture" vs. "Strategy"

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,” when in fact they’re largely “money-first.” So it’s hard to say culture wins, admittedly, because culture is a vague word. I’ll get that to that in a second.

Issue 2: The problem is, “strategy” is also a vague word. A lot of executives don’t know what it really means, and they confuse it with tasks, operations, and logistics. I legitimately once had a job where the “Chief Strategy Officer” spent a portion of his week ordering sandwiches for events. That’s kinda all you need to know, but you could also check out this story from an Australian consultant.

Pause: So now both words are kinda vague. “Strategy” feels like a big, important, adult, business-guy word. But it’s vague and confused with other stuff often. “Culture” feels like a fluffier word business-wise, and it’s also vague.

Issue 3: Neither can be easily simplified, despite calls over the last five years for a return to simplicity in business. (Good luck with the amount of SaaS we have pinging us all day.) The author of that Strategy+Business article says this:

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in recent years, after transitioning from a 30-year career in journalism to a role consulting with large companies, is just how challenging it can be for leaders to develop a clear and simple strategy that everyone at the company can understand and remember. Strategy documents often suffer from being too complex. Or they are often so general that they simply describe what the company does rather than signaling a direction or a goal.

I’d agree with that. Usually at places I’ve worked, strategy documents are so complex that only the person that wrote them, and maybe one person in that department, has read the whole thing. Most people just skim. And again, it’s largely about tasks and not about strategy. It’s usually describing operations and deadlines, not anything about the bigger picture. That’s why the document gets so long.

Issue 4 is where I start to pivot towards “culture” as the winner. It’s an idea called “The Frozen Middle,” whereby middle managers — who broadly cripple the economy as is — cannot give up the status quo or their perch, so even if a “strategy” has been put into play by the senior team, the middle will almost block that strategy or undermine it because it threatens their immediate to intermediate future. The Frozen Middle is a culture problem. As a result, culture in this case would be blocking strategy from happening. So even if you have the greatest strategy in human history, your culture can throw a hard screen on it (basketball term) and knock it on its ass. As a result, “culture” is more relevant to stuff being achieved than “strategy” is.

Solving some problems: Here’s a halfway decent definition of “culture,” actually. And here’s the essence of getting “strategy” right.

All this said, even though you might respect the hell out of the word “strategy” because it feels so virtuous to say over and over, which one would you say really “wins” if they went head-to-head?