A New Way to Think

6

Culture

You can only change it by altering how individuals work with one another.

The role and importance of a company’s culture is best captured by a combination of two of the world’s greatest management scholars. Peter Drucker opined that “culture—no matter how defined—is singularly persistent.” (It is an urban myth that he ever said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”) MIT Sloan professor Edgar Schein declared that “culture determines and limits strategy.” The implication is, of course, that any strategy not predicated on a company’s existing culture will fail—unless the culture can be changed, which is challenging in the extreme.

So, what is culture—and why is it so persistent and limiting to strategy?

There are as many definitions ...