Strategy and Culture

I came across an interesting post about organizational culture on the Kitetail blog, and it makes an important point about strategy:

Your strategy and culture are joined at the hip: Lets face it, your culture has a big influence on how your company does things. This influence certainly extends to your strategy. Just think about different generic strategies: cost leadership, differentiation, fast follower, … Each of these require a different set of cultural characteristics to be successful. Along the same lines, for any change in your strategy, you will need to identify the cultural behaviors that need to be changed and managed.

Strategy is jointed at the hip of other things too: structure and leadership just to name two. So how is it possible to have a stand-alone strategy making process that does not tie into these other things?

Comments

[Virgil Carter]

Cogent comment, Jamie. I don't know how strategy or leadership can be divorced from organizational culture.

At the same time, you made an earlier comment concerning culture that it can be changed through changing processes (to which I agree, if I understood correctly). The old association addage (which I believe from experience) is: "if you want to change the culture, change the processes and wait for the new processes to become ingrained."

Does this suggest that there may be a certain flexibility for processes of strategy and leadership (among others) connected to culture?