Wednesday, November 21, 2018

CULTURING DECISIONS, BIRTHING STRATEGY.




With my eyes shut and such heavy strategy names like Sun Tzu, Niccolo Machiavelli, Carl Von Clausewitz, Karl Marx, Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin; their documented lives and the practical ways they employed strategy running through my mind [thanks to my new Strategy Bible – ‘Strategy: A History’ by (Emeritus professor of war studies) Lawrence Freedman (Financial Times best book on strategy from as far back as 2013)]; I cannot but shake my head and mind to the myth we have crowned strategy with today…

‘What is strategy?’ Is the most googled phrase that contains strategy”. Those were the words of Bradley Brezinski (one of my strategy mentors).

Despite the plethora of materials and resources in our knowledge-age; people, corporates and entities the world over still strive to substantiate the essence of strategy. I am not going to add to the over 2 billion results google fetches you when you type the phrase -‘What is Strategy?’, but I would simply touch on one of the very many crucial aspects of implementing strategy in a corporate environment.

Of what good is all the strategy in the world without its implementation? May I swiftly accentuate organizational CULTURE and possibly make sense of how it may help to implement strategy.

Borrowing a leaf from Wikipedia, Organizational culture encompasses values and behaviors that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of a business.

Organizational culture is a chief influencer of the way people react within an entity. Since implementing strategy boils down to how people act and the corresponding reactions to those actions, its indications, counter-indications and the allocation of resources through it all; then it is key to initiate a cultured (pun intended) reaction zone in the least.

No one else is better positioned than the manager – whose primary work is making decisions. An effective manager (that thinks through the process before deciding) directly influences the actions and inactions of others, whether with direct reports or verticals. At work yesterday, I made several decisions and whether I want to or not, I will be making more tomorrow. Deciding nothing is in itself a decision until I have the power to freeze time.

These daily decisions form the cradle of culture. Not that fancy prose the HR and/or executive team came up with. Those are at best the stated values and they have to be exhibited, then become behavioral norms that influence decisions. Everyday decisions especially by managers who directly influence the actual ‘doers’ in every organization drive culture.

It is critical to expend resources in initiating the cultured zone within which managers and decision makers (with influence on people and teams) will execute the everyday decisions as this is the core of the last-mile in implementing strategy.

In Peter Drucker’s words – Culture does eat strategy for breakfast!

…opening my eyes to this Ah-mazing (as Yemi Faseun puts it) quote on page 575 cannot be mere coincidence, as it sums up my exact closing thought 

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” – Yogi Berra (also attributed to Albert Einstein).

#Culture #Strategy #Management 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Privileged to have worked across the high-capital construction, fast-paced e-commerce & the precision-driven outsourcing industries; 'Kayode KOLADE is a Business Strategist and Project Manager with experience in People, Process & Operations Optimization, a Soft Skills Trainer and Mentor with a creed to continuous improvement. A Fellow of both The Institute of Leadership & Management and The Learning & Performance Institute. 

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