Culture meets strategy

In my previous article, we talked about why the famous quote that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ isn’t actually how culture works. 

In short, your culture should never be eating your strategy. Your strategy is as important as your culture, and there should never be a competition between the two. Your culture should enable your strategy. 

And that led us to another conversation. Instead of ‘culture eats strategy’, what happens when ‘culture meets strategy’? 

If you think about it, culture always meets strategy. It doesn’t matter whether your company has one person, or ten people, or ten thousand people, the two will meet. And when they do, one of two things will happen. Your culture will eat your strategy, or it will feed it. 

What do I mean by this? Well, the culture of a business effectively determines how that business operates. It affects how decisions are made, how teams work together, how respect is shown, how values are lived every day. It makes it clear what is valued, and what is not.

So, if your business says it’s all about inclusion and people, but in real life the culture is based on ticking boxes and excluding certain groups, the culture will prevail. Every time. You can have the most visionary strategy ever, but if your culture’s not aligned, it’s going to eat your strategy. 

And that often happens when businesses aren’t deliberate about driving and shaping a positive culture that supports their strategy. If you don’t pay attention to it, it might become something you don’t like. It’s up to you to decide what happens – eat or feed. 

So, my question to you today is this. Is your culture busy feeding your strategy, or is it eating your strategy? The answer lies in your hands.