{"id":16426,"date":"2012-11-01T05:15:10","date_gmt":"2012-11-01T05:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=16426"},"modified":"2012-11-01T13:09:11","modified_gmt":"2012-11-01T13:09:11","slug":"does-culture-trump-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=16426","title":{"rendered":"Does Culture Trump Strategy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The always interesting John Hagel<\/a><\/strong> tweeted a link<\/a> recently to an old post<\/a> at \u00a0Mill’s-Scofield Innovanomic<\/strong>s<\/a>, a blog run by a business strategist and consultant with a science background, Deb Mills-Scofield<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Summer\u2019s Trump\u00a0Cards<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

….Culture Trumps Strategy: The best made plans are worthless if they\u2019re not aligned with the culture. Sometimes the strategy can help transform the culture (for good or bad), but if the\u00a0culture doesn\u2019t support it, it won\u2019t happen<\/a>.\u00a0 Perhaps that\u2019s why I think CEOs need to be CCS\u2019s \u2013 Chief Culture Stewards.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Challenge<\/em>:\u00a0 Start to check the health of your culture \u2013 really, be brutally honest -before the end of August.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was interesting to me.<\/p>\n

Obviously, Mills-Scofield was concerned here with “business strategy” and organizational theory<\/a> and not strategy<\/a> in the classical sense of war and statecraft. As Dr. Chet Richards<\/a><\/strong> has pointed out, unlike a military leader in war, businessmen are not trying to destroy their customers, their employees or even their competition, but while not the same kind of “strategy”, the underlying cognitive action, the “strategic thinking”,\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0is\u00a0similar. Perhaps the same.<\/p>\n

So, shifting the question back to the original context of war and statecraft, does culture trump strategy?<\/p>\n

On twitter, I had a brief twitter discussion on this with Marc Danziger<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>who was sympathetic to the proposition of cultural supremacy. I am not so sure, though I think the relationship between culture and strategy is an iterative one, the degree to which culture matters in strategy is highly contextual and is determined by how broadly you define cultural values as being directly operative in driving the scenario. Some disjointed comments:<\/p>\n