What is Culture Joined Strategy For Breakfast?

by Les Mottosky

Many are familiar with Peter Drucker's legendary assertion, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." As an insight it resounds with truth. But as out-of-context advice, it discounts strategy while inferring a mutual exclusivity of the two concepts.

What if you're a leader who likes to have your cake for breakfast and eat it too?

Since Drucker's famous quote became a slide in every leadership guru's PowerPoint, the holy grail of the curious leader became: "How do I balance, emphasize, and operationalize the necessity of both?"

The answer is simple. And not at all easy; the team builds the strategy –top-to-bottom, soup-to-nuts, collaboratively. Strategy becomes a cultural project created, executed, adapted, and consistently measured by the team.

Simple right?

The reason it's not easy is because the process is complex. It requires a system. One that emphasizes the foundation of humility, simplification, clarity, consensus and a capacity to handle the discomfort of uncertainty.

A strategy is not a solution. It's a creative, calculated leap into the unknown.

This act can activate a burdensome delusion that affects most leaders at some point in their career: the belief that being a leader means having the answer. That's why people follow, right?

Nope.

Leadership isn't about enrolling followers. It's possessing the willingness to go first and try the new thing. To demonstrate the values. To reveal that organizational vulnerability. (Then people choose to follow. Or not.)

Divulging organizational vulnerabilities is scary and helpful. Because once they're stated and clear, they can be dealt with. This is an act of trust. And trust begets trust. When trust thrives, the culture glows, grows, and buzzes with momentum and impact. The kind that energizes honesty, courage, and collective growth.

It energizes execution, too.

By being the leader who understands and accepts responsibility for the implementation and execution of the strategy, not the creation of it, you end up at a breakfast table of allies.

A group of partners willing to leap into the unknown together.

The post-leap journey feels like you're constructing a parachute. But you're also weaving the net of culture. Together. One act of trust at a time.

And when that's happening, everybody eats well.

TAGS: #Strategic Leadership #Audacious Strategies #Irreverent Wisdom #Adaptation As Innovation #Creative Option Solving #Culture = Strategy

Les Mottosky

Adaptation Strategist // I help organizations turn creativity into their competitive advantage by aligning leadership, culture, and strategy to unlock adaptive innovations.

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lesmottosky@mac.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/les-mottosky-9b94527/