The Leadership Capital Index

CHAPTER 8Cultural Capability

Investors Want Organizations with Effective Culturess

As Peter Drucker is credited with saying, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”¹ It is easier to craft a new strategy than to renew a culture—and hard as personal habits are to change, organization cultures are worse. My colleagues and I recently worked with a company that had competed through product innovation for decades but wanted to evolve its strategy to customer intimacy. Leaders could articulate this pivot, talk about why it mattered, define desired outcomes in financial and customer terms, and recommend the actions to make it happen. But when they started doing so, nothing seemed to change; they ran into deep-rooted work patterns and assumptions that were ...