The phrase “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is widely attributed to Peter Drucker, although there is no reliable evidence that he actually said or wrote it. Whether or not he did, it makes sense; a strategy without a culture is homeless, doomed to wander the halls of business schools in search of somewhere to belong. Culture is one of those words that can be appropriated to serve whatever purpose we require; has a comforting lack of definition that makes it malleable in everyday use, and an area that I think we become defensively, wilfully blind to, given that it shapes just about every action that we take.
The word has its root in the Latin, colere. and carries a number of meanings: to till, to dwell in, to attend to and to worship. Cicero saw it as a living thing. His idea of cultura animi treats the mind as ground that requires tending, with philosophy as the tool. The root sense is that culture is not a thing, but rather an activity of something living over time that produces an outcome that cannot be specified in advance.
Conditions for a healthy crop can only be created, not assembled. Culture is not a product.
Cultura animi is the horticultural root of the word. Running alongside it is Herder’s pluralising of culture into cultures in the 1780s, and that is what gave the anthropological tradition its starting point. It takes us down the winding path to the way we often currently use it: in a sense of production, performance from the arts or a sector, as something curated and displayed as achievement.
I think it’s difficult to see business as a culture, rather than as an artefact of the culture in which it takes place. Which, given the way that business is shaping our world at the moment, I find an unsettling thought.
So I thought I’d unpack it a little further, as part of my current experiments in where AI fits into my work. I used Perplexity for research and Claude for refining to give me the ideas to write this post by hand. I don’t think for a moment it saved me very much time, but it did give me more substance and texture to play with. (If you want to play with the ideas, I’ve put some of the sources that I used at the end of this post.)
There is a view that culture is a whole way of life, that it is ordinary, and that it includes the car park, the tea round, and the ten minutes before a meeting starts. And then there are those who see culture as meaning, an idea of webs of significance which we have spun and in which we are suspended; something to be read rather than measured.
Then there are those who see culture as repertoire. Culture supplies the habit, skills, and styles from which we assemble our strategies, and determine how things get done rather than addressing what people want. Something performative. The very stuff of business schools.
Some economists see culture as equilibrium. That our firms and corporations exist because culture is, for a while, a more efficient way to organise production than detailed contracts, with the boundary drawn around the areas where we can choose culture as an organising device. It is what governs our conduct when the contract runs out.
Perhaps that’s one of the biggest issues for business. That it becomes easier to define and measure a strategy and then claim a culture which cannot be measured. We end up espousing a culture in terms of artefacts, media, presence, and advertising, claiming rather than living sets of values to which we adhere. Underneath it all is the genuine culture of what we actually do when we turn in the morning.
It’s perhaps one of the main reasons why so many acquisitions fail. You can buy a nice shiny strategy and a set of performance results, but you can’t acquire a culture. I’m sure there are strategy and culture consultants out there who would violently disagree with me, but I’d hold to the idea that you can only use artificial fertiliser for so long before you ruin the soil. Sustainable cultures take time and grow naturally. Anything that is forced is temporary, and not really a culture at all, so much as a marketing tool.
Culture matters because it shapes who we are, how we’re seen, and how we will be seen after we have gone. In a business culture, where everything is driven by data and facts, we leave little room for emotions and identity, even as we develop processes and technology that call our individual identity into question.
To be part of a healthy culture, we need to be seen and witnessed, recognised for doing things that are part of that culture and help develop it. It is the stuff of small ceremonies and rituals that grow and evolve rather than something designed, where people can learn and adopt and shape what they do. It is the culture of the atelier, of craft, and the power of apprenticeship.
And it requires people to pass it on to. A culture with nobody to inherit it is no longer a culture. It is dead on the vine, and I think another reason that when established performance-driven corporations acquire entrepreneurial startups, it almost always ends badly. The ideas and energy that have caused them to grow become foreign bodies in an established organisation, and unless we are careful, corporations become where we exhaust old ideas, and ideas go to die. Corporations end up exhausted.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Ideas are like children. If we try to shape them too early, we just make them clones of what we’re trying to change. As the old line goes, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The fastest way, I think, to destroy a healthy culture is to measure it. “Goodhart’s Law” applies, in that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure*. Never is it more true than when we make money the measure.
So, if we need a healthy culture for a meaningful life, but find only synthetic, highly processed ones in the workplace, where do we go?
Outside The Walls.
Somewhere where the soil has not been artificially fertilised out of nutrition. Somewhere where conversations and ideas can be allowed to emerge and grow and, when necessary, fail. Somewhere we can ask, “What’s really going on here?” and work it out for ourselves without being told a truth by those whose interests it serves.
We don’t need to pack up and leave. We just need to find the spaces where we can get the time and space for a while to entertain the possible and give ourselves time to notice what’s emerging. There are no books, no instruction manuals, no experts. We just need to start conversations with people we want to learn from. No agendas. Places to learn on our own terms.
I’ve been running these sorts of experiments for years now, and they always work. Normally in ways that we don’t expect and couldn’t possibly predict at the outset.
It does not require anything other than a willingness to share a space for an hour on a regular basis to ask “what’s really going on here?” Staying with the question does the work; because the answer is always changing.
There is something of the alchemical about it, turning the base materials we are working with into something rather more valuable. You don’t need help, but if you want to see what we’re working on, visit The Athanor. It’s small scale, one group at a time, working it out as we go along.
Somewhere we can grow the cultures we want. Without the artificial fertiliser.
Sources
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784–91. The pluralising of culture into cultures, and the opening of the anthropological line.
Williams, Raymond. “Culture is Ordinary,” in Conviction, ed. Norman Mackenzie. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958. Culture as a whole way of life, including the parts nobody thinks of as culture.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Webs of significance we have spun and are suspended in; culture as something read rather than measured.
Swidler, Ann. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (1986): 273–286. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095521 Culture as a repertoire of habits and styles shaping how things are done, rather than a set of ends.
Gorton, Gary B., and Alexander K. Zentefis. “Corporate culture as a theory of the firm.” Economica 91, no. 364 (2024): 1391–1423. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12537 Culture as the organising device where contracts run out, and as an explanation for why acquisitions fail and why cultures resist change.
Guiso, Luigi, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales. “The value of corporate culture.” Journal of Financial Economics 117, no. 1 (2015): 60–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2014.05.010 Advertised values showed no correlation with profitability; integrity as perceived by employees did, and was harder to sustain in publicly traded firms.
*: The formulation is Marilyn Strathern’s. Strathern, Marilyn. “’Improving ratings’: audit in the British University system.” European Review 5, no. 3 (1997): 305–321.