Hey Reader,
Long time - no email from me! Guess why? A lot has changed. And if you are new here - welcome!
So what happened? In a nutshell - I moved to Gothenburg (Sweden) - and yes, I took my dogs with me. I started an Executive MBA program, tried sales mentorship for a couple of months (didn't exactly work out), met some amazing people who inspire me and...here we are.
Okay, so today we are going to touch on an interesting topic and it is why culture eats strategy for breakfast and what can we do about it?
You’ve probably heard the phrase by Peter Drucker. It is a brutal, quantifiable reality for businesses. Think about it: You craft a brilliant new strategy - it is ambitious, innovative, customer-centric. You unveil it to the team. The slides are perfect. The Q&A is strong. You feel confident. But then... a hypocricy happens? Everyone returns to their desks and re-enters the real company culture. We talk about the one defined not by your speeches, but by what gets rewarded, promoted, or silently punished. This is where strategies go to die...unfortunately.
Let's Get Concrete:
The Numbers Behind a Cultural Drag
This isn’t theoretical. The data shows how culture directly strangles strategy:
Think about your own team when reading this: A Gallup study found that teams with low engagement see 18% lower productivity and a staggering 43% higher employee turnover. This isn't just an HR metric; it's a direct leak of execution capacity and institutional knowledge, killing your strategy from the inside.
This is the cultural tax you pay. The evidence is overwhelming:
- Harvard Business Review analysis confirms that the single biggest barrier to execution is a "misaligned culture," where the values you preach aren't the behaviors you reward.
- A global study by PwC found that 63% of CEOs report that company culture is a major competitive advantage for driving successful change and execution.
Your strategy is the destination on the map. Your culture is the engine of your vehicle. If your engine is leaking power (low productivity) and burning through its own parts (high turnover), the best map in the world is...useless.
A Case Study in Cultural Sabotage:
Microsoft's "Stack Ranking" Era
In the 2000s, Microsoft had a dominant market position and a strategy of innovation. Yet, it missed the internet, search, and mobile waves. Why?
The culprit was an internal cultural mechanic called "stack ranking." Every team was forced to grade employees on a bell curve, with a set percentage (often the bottom 10%) being shown the door.
The result? A culture of internal cannibalism, not collaboration. Why help a colleague if it might push you into the bottom 10%? Knowledge hoarding became the norm. Teams focused on making their own projects look good, even at the expense of the company's broader goals.
Their culture of internal competition actively ate their strategy of innovation. The turnaround only began when CEO Satya Nadella dismantled this system and consciously built a "growth mindset" culture making the cultural shift the essential first step to enabling their current cloud-first strategy.
So, What Can We Do About It?
Your 3-Step Culture-Strategy Check
As an operator, I know that vague advice doesn't work. You need a diagnostic. For any new strategic goal, ask:
- The Hiring Test: Are we hiring for curiosity and adaptability, or just for a narrow skill set? Are we looking for "cultural add" or just "cultural fit" with the old, possibly broken, ways?
- The Promotion Test: Who actually gets promoted? The person who never makes a mistake, or the one who took a smart risk, learned from a failure, and shared those lessons? Your promotion criteria are the single strongest signal of your real culture.
- The Meeting Test: What happens in the first 10 minutes of a project kick-off? Is the focus on defining the problem and encouraging diverse viewpoints, or immediately jumping to solutions and assigning blame? How you run meetings is a microcosm of your operating culture.
Don't let your strategic breakfast get eaten.
Here’s to building engines that can handle any journey
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