Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Management book aphorisms are often the stuff of business school samplers and conference nightmares. And – like most cliches – are often rooted in some truth even if apocryphal. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast" is often attributed to HBS management guru Peter Drucker but also to Jack Welch but also to Mark Fields but probably actually comes from a much earlier organizational strategist from the '80s named Edgar Schein who said (with more nuance) "culture determines and limits strategy" – which although distinctly less quotable or t-shirt ready is probably a more useful expression of the concept of how culture and strategy reinforce or undermine each other in an organization.

Strategy is the scaffolding that connects resources to mission by defining what each team will create and what those outputs will enable/generate/inspire in the world. Strategy creates stronger agreements and alignments within and across teams about what you're working to achieve and how you intend to get there – paths and guardrails. Culture is the combination of spoken and unspoken principles that underlie peoples decisions and behaviors along with the rituals that reinforce them – how we walk together. They are doing very related work with in our teams and organizations. But one operates largely invisibly via the establishment of high-context methods and mechanisms whereas the other enforces alignment with explicit declarations to constantly recognize agreements in a low-context culture.

Culture eliminates meta-work – the meetings about the meetings. Strategy often demands meta-work to sustain itself – but with sufficient consistent repetition can lead to culture. Where strategy is an explicit framework and where culture becomes implicit, internalized, automatic, unspoken alignment agreement and freedom to act, license to operate with confidence that the choices and decisions made amongst and between teammates will be aligned by default and that everyone will always make aligned choices when confronted with new scenarios – even if not exactly the same choices. Strategy creates explicit paths and guardrails, where culture defines methods and mechanisms of operating regardless of paths. In highly divergent or emergent contexts, teams with strong culture remain aligned despite outside pressures or complex unexpected scenarios while continuing to move forward where strategy might demand an organization stop to ensure alignment (or realignment) or to re-strategize entirely. In this way, in addition to eliminating meta-work and reducing operational friction, strong culture is also more adaptive than strong strategy on its own.

So why does this distinction matter? Don't we need both? Yes, of course. And lots of folks have written and studied this relationship over the years, but right now in this moment of civic upheaval I see ad hear a lot of "re-strategerizing" conversations – and this supremacy of culture over strategy is as true for good cultures as for bad ones. Which is why – as Schein originally illuminated – good strategy can't overcome bad culture. Good strategy as path and guardrails elevates the floor for an organization, but culture sets the ceiling. So when we want to be more ambitious, we invest in the rituals that elevate culture creating more space to be more creative and lift our ceiling. When our teams are struggling for direction or we find our teams diverging and in need of better guardrails or clearer paths, we invest in strategy. If the path is clear, but we find ourselves underperforming, turn to culture. When dedication and commitment and shared belief is high, but path is unclear, turn to strategy.

Last updated: 18 Apr 2025