It doesn’t matter how good your strategy is if the culture isn’t aligned with it. And when your culture IS aligned with strategy, then things magically happen.
David Maister talked about it in Strategy and the Fat Smoker, and this article from Farnam Street summarises Plain Talk on the same subject.
This podcast with Margaret Heffernan outlines some practical ways to influence strategy: for example, when she found people were siloed and Friday night drinks weren’t an option (she came from the UK pub-culture to the USA drive-to-work culture), she set up a 4:30 Friday afternoon everyone downs tools and 3 people will tell us about themselves, every week. She talks about the discomfort that caused, and about the change in culture it created. Something so simple.
I also love from this podcast:
I respect you enough to argue with you
Other posts on culture in this blog:
