HBR's 10 Must Reads 2019

The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture

by Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng

STRATEGY AND CULTURE ARE AMONG the primary levers at top leaders’ disposal in their never-ending quest to maintain organizational viability and effectiveness. Strategy offers a formal logic for the company’s goals and orients people around them. Culture expresses goals through values and beliefs and guides activity through shared assumptions and group norms.

Strategy provides clarity and focus for collective action and decision making. It relies on plans and sets of choices to mobilize people and can often be enforced by both concrete rewards for achieving goals and consequences for failing to do so. Ideally, it also incorporates adaptive ...