{"id":1207,"date":"2021-02-24T10:15:54","date_gmt":"2021-02-24T10:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/?p=1207"},"modified":"2021-02-24T10:16:02","modified_gmt":"2021-02-24T10:16:02","slug":"culture-versus-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/02\/24\/culture-versus-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Culture versus strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Recently, in one of the company boards that I\u2019m part of, we approved the new product strategy. This strategy is quite a deviation from the previous one in that we balance much more between investing in the current, main product, which used to get virtually all investment earlier, and new product initiatives to serve adjacent markets and help grow the business. However, after the board meeting, we discussed operationalizing the strategy and the main topic was that the most difficult part would be to change the culture of the employees in the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As famously said by Peter Drucker, culture eats strategy for \nbreakfast. Once you get a certain culture in place, the general \nexperience is that it\u2019s extremely difficult to change. You can present \nall the strategy slide decks you want, but it\u2019s surprisingly difficult \nto actually make people change their ways of working. Although this \nperspective is quite accurate, it easily puts companies in a bit of a \nvictim role: the culture is what we have and we have to live with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diving a little deeper, I believe that this is a fallacy that we have\n to avoid falling into. Culture can be defined as the norms and values \nthat we organize ourselves by. Norms are defined as the established \nstandards or expectations and values are the set of beliefs and ideas \nthat we uphold as important within the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, virtually every company I work with views itself as \ncustomer centric. However, the ways this materializes can vary greatly. \nIn the company that triggered this post, the implementation of \ncustomer-centricity was to try to respond to every suggestion, request \nand demand from every customer. The result was a backlog of an infinite \namount of minor features that may please some customers but that didn\u2019t \nmove the needle from a competitiveness perspective. The way we responded\n to this was by setting a strategy where we explicitly allocate \nresources using the three horizons model and within each horizon with an\n explicit allocation to roadmap work versus customer requested work. We \nstill allocate resources to respond to customer requests, but \nsignificantly less than before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, making this strategy real basically requires us to externalize \nthe norms and values by which we\u2019ve been operating. Once we\u2019ve done \nthis, we have a basis for discussion to realize the changes we\u2019re \nlooking for. Often, it\u2019s not so much that a completely new set of norms \nand values needs to be defined, but rather that the balance between \nconflicting norms and values needs to be changed. For example, in some \ncompanies, an urgent request from a customer is always prioritized over \nroadmap work. When it\u2019s time for a retrospective and it\u2019s clear that few\n of the features on the roadmap were realized, everyone sagely accepts \nthis as there were too many requests from customers that needed to be \nprioritized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the last sentence again: \u201cneeded to be prioritized\u201d is a direct \nexpression of the company culture and something that you as a leader \nneed to be highly sensitive to. Not reacting to such statements makes \nyou immediately complicit in perpetuating the old culture and sabotaging\n the defined strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To realize a new strategy and upgrade your company culture, I believe\n that at least three actions are key. First, make the current norms and \nvalues explicit. Not in general terms, but as specific as possible. Then\n indicate where the new strategy requires us to make changes in the way \nwe prioritize our time and energy. Exemplify it and make sure that \neveryone rationally understands what the new strategy means in terms of \ncultural changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, as a leader, you need to embody the new strategy. When I \nlived in the US, many parents told their children: do as I say, not as I\n do. However, it\u2019s perfectly obvious for any parent that children mimic \nthe behavior of their parents, not their words. The same is the case for\n employees in a company: people will mimic the behavior of leaders, not \ntheir words. So, as Gandhi said, be the change you want to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third, operationalize the strategy for every individual in terms of \nwhat it means in terms of day-to-day work, priorities and interaction \nand follow up on the new ways of working. Humans are habit-driven \ncreatures and it\u2019s too easy to fall back into old ways unless we\u2019re \nconstantly reminded of what\u2019s expected from us. This also requires an \nescalation path as conflicts will surface between the old and new \ncultural patterns. If individuals are required to sort out these \nconflicts themselves, most will fall back into the old, safe ways to \navoid any perceived risks. Allowing for escalation will make it safer to\n take risks as the responsibility is abdicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While it\u2019s true that culture eats strategy for breakfast, it doesn\u2019t mean that you can\u2019t realize changes in the company culture that facilitate the strategy you\u2019re looking to operationalize. It requires us to externalize the norms and values in the old culture to make the required changes in priorities explicit, for leaders to embody the new strategy and behave by it and for each individual to operationalize the strategy in concrete, day-to-day terms. This is incredibly hard and time consuming, but the alternative is to not change at all. As Mark Zuckerburg famously said: \u201cThe biggest risk is not taking any risk\u2026 In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get more insights earlier, sign up for my newsletter at <\/em>jan@janbosch.com<\/em><\/a> or follow me on<\/em> janbosch.com\/blog<\/em><\/a>, LinkedIn (<\/em>linkedin.com\/in\/janbosch<\/em><\/a>), Medium<\/a> or Twitter (<\/em>@JanBosch<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, in one of the company boards that I\u2019m part of, we approved the new product strategy. This strategy is quite a deviation from the previous one in that we balance much more between investing in the current, main product, which used to get virtually all investment earlier, and new product initiatives to serve adjacent … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1209,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions\/1209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}