“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
Peter Drucker
Friday morning thoughts – we have all heard Peter Drucker’s (in)famous quote but what does that mean in practice?
My take, strategy is the plan but culture is how we feel about it. Culture is how the group acts, reacts, and interacts. Culture conforms the individual to the group. Culture is our intuition; our ‘gut feeling’.
But Intuition can be wrong. In science, when our results do not match our expectations, we say the results are not ‘intuitive’. The path to becoming an expert is experience and over time, experience corrects our intuition.
This is why “culture eats strategy for lunch” – and the path to change the culture is similar to how our intuition is trained; by results, consistently and persistently reproduced. Your team’s culture is a reflection of the results they have observed over and over regarding how you act, react, and interact.
We reduce this concept to “culture is modeled from the top down” which is a true but shallow statement.
Do you agree?
