Strategic Planning - The Role of Culture

Quite a few executives I’ve met would prefer to treat strategic planning as an inorganic black box that, given certain inputs, flawlessly produces expected outputs. Many people who think this way about strategic planning are otherwise brilliant people with strong quantitative backgrounds – which probably explains the tendency to want to treat management as an engineering problem. Now, to be sure, we can often benefit from the objective treatment of our strategic issues as dynamic systems to be tinkered with, but we must never forget that our strategies, in the end, rely upon the behavior of people.

People are wonderful – at their best, bright, creative, and thoughtful. People are also unpredictable, and in groups, their behavior is rarely as manageable as we would like. Within any organization, employee culture can be either and asset or a hindrance to strategy – so it’s very useful to look at steps we can take to create a culture that works with our strategy, rather than against it.

-Robert