That quote is attributed to Peter Drucker, the amazing leader who helped redefine business in Japan and then around the world.

It’s good to remind ourselves that plans and strategies are fine – even necessary. But the real foundation of getting anything done is the culture of the organization.

This brings to mind a year in an organization I worked for about twenty years ago. The company was getting into serious financial trouble, and it was noted that growth in the number of employees was getting out of hand while the economy was headed the wrong direction.

Fine, time to tighten the belt. Not fun for anybody, but we’ll get through it.

So the CEO issued an edict that hiring for the rest of the fiscal year would be frozen. Only the top two tiers of management could make an exception if there was a critical need.

At the end of the year, the numbers came in and the CEO was livid. The number of employees had actually grown, by a significant amount. Expenses were a disaster, which severely impacted the bottom line.

How the heck could this happen?

Well, they hadn’t addressed the culture of the organization, which I would describe as:

  • Growth is good. We’ve always grown.
  • Every division in the company is pretty autonomous, and makes its own decisions, thank you.
  • We’re a bunch of smart people and we find a way to get things done, no matter what the obstacle.

Instead of “employees” we hired “consultants.”

We worked hard to justify each new hire, and found the formula for doing that successfully.

The top executives of the company weren’t sure about their role, so they ended up deferring to the recommendation of their people which was always to justify hiring more people.

These, my friends, are culture issues. And when culture is at odds with the organization’s strategy, culture will win out because it’s so deeply embedded in each and every person.

But we don’t want to just give up and defer to culture! After all, we are the leaders and it’s our job to define and steer culture as well.

That’s when we recognize that there are ways – but not easy ways – to shift a culture which is headed in the wrong direction. The best example is when there’s a deep crisis which shows everybody that we’re headed into a brick wall and MUST change. NOW.

In the above story, that sense of crisis wasn’t internalized because the culture was “P&L is something those executives worry about.” Not OUR problem, and certainly WE don’t understand how P&Ls work or why they’re important.

But it’s not always a negative crisis. A positive example is when John F Kennedy declared that “by the end of the decade we will take man to the moon and back,” and “we do these things not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard.”

That inspired an entire nation to rally their passion and energy!