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Your Put it to Work Challenge
Imagine your organization doing exactly and completely what it says it’s out to do. No barriers, no limitations, no money problems, no personnel issues. What would be different about the way that you work? How would the process inside your organization change?
What would you gain?
What would you lose?
Structure Eats Strategy for Breakfast
At least some of you will know the old Peter Drucker quote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In other (perhaps less cannibalistic?) terms, Drucker asserted that often-unwritten norms and rules of behavior drive the success or failure of an organization - and that changing strategy, without changing the culture of the organization so that it reinforces that strategy, results in… a lot of wasted effort. Tell me you haven’t seen that happen.
But “culture” is a squishy word. And that squishiness has led organizations to ignore that part, to pooh-pooh it, or to equate “culture” with foosball tables in the lobby and boozy Thursday happy hours.
And I’m pretty sure that’s not what Drucker meant. So at the risk of angering the kaizen gods, I’m making a petition to change the sentence:
Structure eats strategy for breakfast.
A culture, after all, is a set of expectations, rules, accepted processes. A culture is the psychological and sociological structure in which we do our things. The collective operating system.
Most of the time, when we try to change an organization’s culture, we make three errors:
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