How culture drives strategy

All my career, I've observed culture driving strategy, and now someone has EXPLAINED!

Harvard Business Review: Build a Corporate Culture that Works, 2024-July/August by Erin Meyer

Ever since Peter Drucker famously declared that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” there has been a widespread understanding that managing corporate culture is key to business success. Yet few companies articulate their corporate culture in such a way that the words become an organizational reality that guides employee behavior. Which raises the question: If culture eats strategy for breakfast, how should you be cooking it?

I have been studying culture in organizations in my roles as a professor and as an adviser to businesses for the past 20 years. I have looked at companies that have struggled to build cultures that shape the behavior of their employees—and at a few that seem to have cracked the code. In this article I draw on that experience to offer six simple guidelines to help managers who are confronting the challenges of culture building.

The steps, presented abstractly with GREAT examples in the article:

1. Build your culture based on real-world dilemmas
2. Move you culture from abstraction to action
3. Paint your culture in full color
4. Hire the right people, and they will build the right culture
5. Make sure that culture drives strategy
6. Don't be a purist