Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Corporate culture has a powerful influence in the leadership style of any organization. When you are implementing a strategy management initiative, you need to take care with the corporate culture. Sometimes you want to change the strategy without realizing that the culture need to change first. For a well-implemented strategy, one of the principles is consider the strategy as everyone's job, you need motivated people to implement the strategy. The way you are going to drive your company need to be well understood. You need to align the organization with the strategy.

Jonathan Becher wrote a good piece in his blog on this issue, entitled Culture eats strategy for breakfast. He commented about his experience, and explained why he first concentrated on changing the culture rather than working on strategy or objectives or metrics.

He mentioned a 2005 Harvard Business Review study of more than 100 corporations and thousands of executive assessments showed that culture influences leadership style more than any other factor. Regardless of job function, employees who work in the same organization are 30% more likely to exhibit similar leadership styles than people who do the same job but work in different companies. He also mentioned an article of The Wall Street Journal that concluded that the biggest roadblocks for new leaders include:
1 - Not understanding or caring about the current culture
2 - Assuming the current leadership culture can support the new direction/strategy
3 - Not articulating his/her aspirational culture for the team

Becher finished with the statement: "Goals, initiatives, and metrics. I have a huge appetite for strategy management. But I shouldn’t forget that breakfast is the most important meal of the day – it all starts with culture."

When I mentioned Jonathan Becher's post on Twitter, Bruno Aziza replied me with: "culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner. However it is not a substitute for strategy!" I agreed with him, you need to embrace both the culture and strategy. A corporate culture is a key factor in a corporate strategy. The number one purpose of strategy management is alignment. It's interesting for the organizations to foster the culture of performance. Bruno Aziza himself co-wrote with Joey Fitts a great book, where they also mention this issue called: Drive Business Performance - Enabling a Culture of Intelligent Execution.

Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change

Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change - Howard Dresner

Howard Dresner touched on a crucial point in this book: before an organization can succeed, it first must create a culture that values performance, transparency, and accountability.

He said when he began work on his book, his intention was to capture and present best practices of performance management, but along the way, he realized that the missing element that determines success or failure really boils down to the notion of culture. Just as well that he decided to write about performance-directed culture, because he wrote a great and insightful book.

In the book, Howard explains the Performance Culture Maturity Model, a comprehensive model created by him to understand the way of organizations have taken in their search for better performance. The model has six dimensions and four levels of achievement, where the four levels of maturity determine how mature an organization is in each of six performance-directed culture criteria.

He used the Performance Culture Maturity Model as a filter to help select four organizations, and wrote well detailed case studies about them. He wrote one chapter for each organization, showing the issues and efforts to build and sustain a performance-directed culture, and also sharing their setbacks and successes.

I completely agree with his definition: “The performance-directed culture is a journey, not a destination.”

The book is an outstanding reference on how to build a culture of performance in the organizations, and is highly recommended reading for everyone involved with performance management.