Today’s Tuesday Reading is from Vijay Menta, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Vijay may be reached at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.
The famous quote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” often attributed to Peter Drucker, reminds us that even the best plans crumble without cultural alignment. But what if culture and strategy sat together at the breakfast table? Not as rivals, but as partners.
Strategy is what you say you’ll do. Culture is what you really do. When they don’t align, trust erodes, aspirations falter, and chaos follows. Today’s most resilient organizations recognize that strategy and culture are intertwined: they feed and strengthen each other.
Traditional View: Culture vs. Strategy
Historically, strategy was the domain of executives, seen as rational and controllable, while culture was considered soft and slow-moving. This separation often led to brilliant plans that failed due to entrenched behaviors and unspoken norms.
Disconnected, organizations struggle with balancing the critical elements such as the “Why,” “What,” “When,” and “How.” These elements, when misaligned, cause strategies to fail.
A New Paradigm: Culture and Strategy as Partners
Imagine culture and strategy sitting side-by-side. Strategy brings the menu, choices, priorities, and goals. Culture sets the atmosphere, the values, and the behaviors. It provides service with a shared mindset that defines success.
When integrated:
- Strategy respects cultural realities.
- Culture evolves to support strategic goals.
- Trust grows across the organization.
Breakfast becomes a metaphor: a shared, intentional beginning that fuels unity, momentum, and success.
The Four Core Elements of Culture and Strategy
Organizations must move from linear to circular, iterative collaboration between culture and strategy, like an ecosystem rather than an assembly line. The core elements:
The Why
The purpose and mission beyond profit. It is owned by executive leaders to define and culture champions to reinforce. It inspires strategy and culture; adapts over time.
The What
The strategic choices and goals. It is owned by executives and project teams. It must align with culture to succeed.
The How
The everyday actions and behaviors. It is owned by everyone and led by middle managers. Its execution reveals gaps and refines strategy.
The When
The timing for pivots and growth. It is owned by strategy teams and middle managers. It is readiness and timing that shape success.
Shifting Models: From Linear, Top Down to Circular, Iterative
As depicted in the diagram above, this flow is circular, not top-down:
- The Why shapes the What.
- The What must match the How.
- The How influences the When.
- The When loops back to validate the Why.
10 Ideas to Bring Culture and Strategy Together
1. Diagnose Honestly
Before setting a strategy, leaders must deeply understand the true current state of the culture, not the version in marketing materials, but the lived, day-to-day experience by conducting anonymous surveys, listening tours, and focus groups. Create safe spaces for brutal honesty, and with a regular cadence that is well understood.
2. Define Cultural Essentials
One must identify and protect the “secret sauce” while evolving where needed by pinpointing the elements that must evolve to enable future strategy. Collaboratively define your non-negotiables and your growth opportunities.
3. Craft Strategy with Culture in Mind
Engage cross-functional teams early and often. Don’t design strategy in a vacuum. Engage employees at multiple levels and ask, “What cultural shifts must happen for this to succeed?” You will be amazed at what you learn when you ask that question!
4. Activate Leaders as Culture Carriers
Leaders must model desired behaviors. Strategies succeed or fail through leadership behaviors and not PowerPoint decks. Build leadership development programs that focus on cultural literacy, storytelling, and behavior modeling.
5. Celebrate Quick and Daily Wins
Stories build momentum faster than stats. Highlight early and daily small victories where culture and strategy are aligned. Stories change hearts faster than stats. Create recognition rituals that reinforce both the “what” (strategic outcome) and the “how” (cultural behaviors demonstrated).
6. Evolve, Don’t Freeze
Regularly revisit assumptions; adapt dynamically. Culture and strategy must both breathe and adapt over time. Institute regular check-ins with quarterly culture and strategy reviews, where beliefs are challenged, not defended. Provide a psychologically safe space for everyone to express themselves without any repercussions.
7. Earn Trust and Respect
Consistency, transparency, and integrity matter most. The invisible foundation of any successful integration is trust. Without trust, even the best strategy collapses. Leaders must consistently act with transparency, reliability, and integrity. Trust is earned over time, not declared. Say what you will do, and do what you say.
8. Build Micro-Communities
Change grows from small groups outward. Culture and strategy are sustained through local ecosystems, not just enterprise-wide initiatives. Create small, voluntary groups and champions that pilot new ways of working aligned with strategy and cultural goals. Real change scales from pockets of excellence outward, not top-down.
9. Connect Individual Purpose to Organizational Purpose
Purpose fuels resilience. When the purpose is well understood, all failures become a learning exercise, and the team continues to build resilience. When people see how their values connect to the organization’s why, engagement and resilience skyrocket. Include purpose-mapping exercises in onboarding, team meetings, and leadership sessions. Repeat and rinse ever so often, and particularly when you onboard new employees
10. Institutionalize Reflection and Learning
Make learning a regular, strategic practice. Make learning an institutional muscle. Organizations that pause to reflect learn faster than those who only “do.” One must invest in the professional development of their employees and encourage continuous learning. Build rituals for collective reflection (e.g., “culture and strategy retrospectives” after key projects). Identify gaps and initiate continuous improvement projects right after the implementation projects.
Real-World Examples
Microsoft’s Cultural Renaissance
- When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a company famous for internal competition and siloed thinking. Strategic plans existed, but the culture was holding them back.
- Nadella didn’t just issue a new strategy. He launched a cultural transformation centered on a “growth mindset”, encouraging curiosity, collaboration, and learning. Strategy and culture were advanced hand-in-hand. Microsoft regained its innovative edge, restored its reputation, and became one of the world’s most valuable companies.
Netflix’s Culture of Freedom and Responsibility
- Netflix famously codified its culture in a slide deck that went viral, emphasizing autonomy, accountability, and performance. Their strategy, to move aggressively from DVD rental to streaming and later into content creation, was bold and disruptive.
- Without a culture that empowered risk-taking, adaptability, and brutal honesty, Netflix could never have pivoted so successfully. Culture and strategy were two sides of the same coin.
Patagonia’s Mission-Driven Growth
- Patagonia’s strategy to build high-quality, sustainable outdoor gear aligns perfectly with its activist culture. Employees are deeply committed to environmental causes, and the company backs that up with real actions, from suing the government over public land policies to donating Black Friday sales to nonprofits.
- Their culture energizes their strategic decisions; their strategy reinforces their culture. The result? Loyal customers, engaged employees, and consistent growth.
Conclusion: A Partnership for the Future
Culture and strategy are not competitors, they’re essential partners. Organizations that intentionally invite both to the table unlock adaptability, resilience, and human-centered success. The future belongs to companies where culture and strategy are inseparable and breakfast is just the beginning.
The most admired companies of the future won’t just have a brilliant strategy or a great culture. They’ll have both, intertwined, inseparable, and deeply human. So, sharing breakfast in any organization is good for building a sustainable future.
Will you be inviting Strategy and Culture to share a breakfast starting tomorrow?
Last week, we asked where you are currently feeling the greatest need for support or focus as a leader navigating uncertainty.
- 27% said balancing short-term demands with long-term strategy
- 23% said supporting the emotional well-being and morale of my staff
- 19% said managing my own energy, priorities, and resilience
- 17% said communicating clearly and transparently with my team
- 14% said aligning my team’s work with shifting institutional goals
The spread of responses across these five dimensions of needing support or focus underscores an important lesson: As we all navigate uncertainty together, we each bring strengths. Where each of us has areas we need to work on, collectively, those are also areas others of us have relative strengths. Rely on each other. As the proverb goes, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.