Welcome to IGW Insights Issue 15!
One of my favorite business aphorisms is, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I love this quote and I share it with clients as often as I can. Business leaders should spend exactly the right amount of time (i.e., as little as possible, but not too little) on strategy and as much time as possible on culture.
Why? Because execution is driven by culture, not strategy.
A strategy is a hypothesis, a set of assumptions about how a business might succeed given what leadership knows about its markets, opportunities, and risks. At its worst, it is a stack of PowerPoint slides, the proverbial binder from the consultant that sits on a shelf collecting dust. At its best, strategy leads to a prioritized plan of action.
But then what?
Somebody has to do something about it. We call that ‘execution,’ but how do we make it happen? The answer is culture.
Culture is like the Force in Star Wars, a classic film from the 1970s you might have heard of. Culture, like the Force, is an energy field that “surrounds us and penetrates us.” It gives a company its power and binds all the members of the company together.
Culture is the unseen source of energy that subconsciously tells people how they are expected to communicate, collaborate, and treat one another. My reflections continue here.
Recommended Reading and Listening
I’ve recommended Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling in the past. It’s one of my favorite works of fiction. Besides being such a pleasurable read, it is a case study of why culture is so central to high performance. The book is about a young boy from a wealthy family who is thrown from a boat in a storm, carried away by fierce waves, and rescued by the crew of a fishing boat called the We’re Here. The captain of that ship, Disko Troop, oddly enough, did not go to business school, does not have an MBA, and yet somehow manages to create an unambiguous culture on the ship. At about 130 pages, this is not a door-stop book. It’s a solid weekend read and is well worth it.
Journaling Exercise
Put pen to paper and answer the following prompts. Give yourself no more than 10 minutes to write:
- What is the worst behavior you tolerate in your organization? That is your culture.
- What is the opposite of that behavior? That is the culture you aspire to.
- How can I use IGW’s Culture Equation to build the culture we intend and aspire to?
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Onward and upward,
Dan Weiss, CEO
