SHORTS | Define Your Strategy and Choose Your Words with Alex Brueckmann

Alex, back to something you said earlier on when you was referencing Steve Jobs and Michael Porter. Seeing as we're. We're quoting some of the, the greats, let's quote someone else. I can see you're smiling already because I think you know what question I'm gonna going to ask you. A good old Peter Drucker quote, the one you see on LinkedIn and kind of memes maybe on Instagram all the time, when. Which interestingly isn't a Peter Drucker quote at all. Even the Peter Drucker Institute says that he never said it. So for those of you listening who don't know where I'm going with this, it's the good old culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? He never said it. Apparently the quote was first attributed to him after he'd passed away. But what the institutes say Peter Drucker did say was culture, no matter how defined, is singularly persistent. So is that the setup? What's your take, Alex, on the intersection between culture and strategy? Because I know you've got an interest in both, right?

Well, strategy and culture, they need each other, right? And you cannot not have a culture. So every organization does have a culture, whether you want it or not, whether you're aware of it or not, whether you build it consciously or not or intentionally or not, it is there. Something is there. And sometimes depending. And I'm working with an organization right now that is deeply aware of that. It's a relatively new organization, and a lot of people in the business have come from competitors. So they're all bringing their types of meetings, their types of thinking, their types of decision making, their types of arguing into that new business. And they've created some sort of a Frankenstein's monster in terms of culture, because in the beginning they were not conscious about that. They were not intentional about forming a unique culture for that business. So everyone could just bring their understanding of certain cultural aspects from how I treat people. Do I scream in a meeting when I'm upset or not? Like, all these kinds of things are now running rampant in that organization and people are like, what's going on here? I had that meeting yesterday and it was completely different than the meeting that I had two days prior with different people. So it is just very, very interesting to see how that dynamic unfolds and how that culture creates itself if you don't take care of it. Now, the interesting part about a strategy process, for me personally, is that when people start to use culture as an excuse for something that you cannot do, strategically speaking, that will Never work in our business because the culture goes against that. And you need to ask yourself a few really tough questions. Culture lives through people. So if people do not support your strategy, the question is always, is it because of the strategy or is it because of the people? And you can use a strategy process if you use it intentionally and you widen its scope slightly so that it does not just touch the strategic business questions, but that it actually touches, who are we, how do we want to operate and how are we going to be successful? It's not about what we do anymore, only it's how do we do it? Like doing the right thing and doing it in the right way. Then you can use a strategy process to form, to shape, to mend culture in an interesting way, what you actually do is you define a few questions or you answer a few questions about your organizational identity. You go into like the softer territory that often people think is an HR exercise or a committee exercise. You talk about the impact that you want to have as a business based on the purpose that you have. You talk about organizational values on a way deeper level than just putting them on posters and hanging them up in the corridors or the water cooler. You touch values and you ask yourself, what do these values mean for everyone? How do we use them in terms of the behaviors that we want to see and also negatively define? What are the behaviors that we will not accept? When you do that, when you combine those cultural elements with those strategic elements, what you're asking yourself in the end is what does performance look like? How do we build a people centric high performance culture? And that means everyone knows how they contribute to strategy and everyone knows the way they contribute to strategy. So you can obviously build an extremely toxic workplace. If everyone is fully aligned on your goals and they try to reach them no matter what, you create a toxic elbow culture where winning becomes the only acceptable target. If you are smart as a leader, you avoid that because it's a short lived success. You're poisoning the well if you do that. If you let people behave in certain ways to counter that. The people centric high performance cultures that I have seen, they have conversations about their values and how they show up in their behaviors. And it is not just about winning. It's about winning in the right way, in the way we want to win. You could use terms like fair and square. You could use terms like not at all cost, whatever it is, that will be very specific to your organization. If you don't balance culture and strategy, it can either become purely culture driven, which is kind of a tree hugger place to be where being nice to each other is more important than getting work done. And on the other hand, on the other end of the spectrum you would have the win at all cost toxic workplace that you don't want either. So there is a spectrum between those two. You need to find your ground somewhere on that spectrum where both people centric behaviors and performance orientation based on your strategy go hand in hand.

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