Why culture is strategy |
We’ve grown strangely comfortable separating things that were never meant to be separated: leadership from management, vision from execution, and perhaps most damaging, culture from strategy.
Inside companies, this split shows up everywhere. A CEO announces a bold future about democratizing access or building a place where people take smart risks. Then culture gets handed to HR as if it belongs on a separate track, while the business strategy unfolds on its own timeline. The result is predictable. Employees are asked to navigate the distance between what leaders say and how the organization actually works.
That distance is not neutral. It creates avoidable friction, the kind of drag that occurs when people try to act on values the organization has not built around. Built In’s 2024 Culture Report shows that 74% of employees feel demotivated in a poor cultural fit, and 61% would leave for a stronger cultural fit even without a major........