Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours.
Quick personal updates before we go-go
The 2023 Castlin keynote menu is now set and features the following four talks. Each is designed to be entertaining, eye-opening and slightly provocative, as per my usual schtick, while also providing practical, immediately implementable takeaways.
Strategy and the recession: how to turn a present weakness into a future strength. On the current financial climate, what it means for businesses, and what to do as a result.
The model corporate citizen: how good management leads to bad results. On the changing requirements of the modern organization, performance gaming, internal community-building (no, not in that sense), diversity, agility and strategic adaptability.
The gravity of e-commerce: how to identify and overcome the hidden costs of an inverted model. Obviously, this builds upon the talk I gave with James Hankins at Cannes Lions last year (which was dubbed by a number of audience members as "the best ever talk at Cannes") and our subsequent white paper. A walkthrough on how to create e-commerce success. For the best possible experience, I strongly recommend you book the both of us.
The ABCDE framework: a guide to adaptive strategy. A preview of my upcoming book (co-written with Steven McCrone), this presentation explains why companies do not know what to do - and what to do about it.
Speaking of speaking, I can now officially confirm that I will indeed be one of the headliners at Techsylvania, the leading tech conference in Eastern Europe, in early June. If you are attending, do let me know, and beers will be had.
In the news
Funko is destroying $30M worth of toys in an attempt to sort out its inventory issues. I admit, I mention this only because it pisses me off as a parent. There are obviously a gazillion business reasons to get rid of stock, but just imagine how many children whose parents cannot afford toys they could have made smile by instead giving it away. Just imagine.
More and more countries are banning TikTok on government devices to address a potential vulnerability of sensitive data. As expected, the company is scrambling to convince advertisers that the app will not be banned outright. Founder Shou Zi Chew has already promised to firewall US user data from foreign access and keep the platform free from government interference, with similar pledges likely in the pipeline for other countries.
Painted lawns - yes, you read that correctly - are becoming more popular as US households in particular try to keep up appearances in more meanings of the expression than one. The niche business sector is growing like weeds.
Item of the week
Christopher Hitchens was, inarguably as far as I am concerned, one of the great critical thinkers of recent times. In this tour de force polemic against the notion of limiting free speech, he perfectly encapsulates that which so many fail to understand: the right to free speech must also include the right of the person with whom you may not agree.
It is not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard; it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen and to hear. Every time you silence someone, you make yourself a prisoner of your own action because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words, your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her opinion.
Moving on.
Culture is not positive
Nor can you design one
When I first thought about the next theme for Strategy in Praxis, culture was fresh in my mind; I had recently encountered someone in a professional setting who kept arguing that any and all strategic challenges that the organization faced had to do with “cultural weaknesses”. In this person’s mind, Peter Drucker had been conservative when he supposedly stated that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” (actually, he never did, which makes the grandstanding around what he meant rather entertaining). No, strategy was evidently being had for lunch and dinner too.
Interestingly, the argument was met by little resistance.
I later realized there were two main reasons why. Firstly, culture is often perceived to be under the company’s control; it is about us, not them. Once the firm had decided that large scale challenges had to do with culture, not strategy, it followed that it could solve them. By contrast, strategy must deal with external factors, problems that frequently are unsolvable, and uncertainty.
Secondly, in the theatre of corporate life, few terms are as omnipresent as culture. Able to carry practically any meaning that actors wish to infer, it allows ubiquitous use by the strategically unversed; any problem can be said to be a culture problem and be met by nodding approval. After all, everyone, from janitor to CEO, has their own idea of what an ideal culture looks like – and will, regardless of what that might be, agree that the status quo is not it. As Dave Snowden once quipped, when in doubt, blame culture.
Interestingly, the strategy vs. culture dialectic is, in a way, another example of an ongoing struggle that can be traced back the very genesis of culture itself. As David Graeber has pointed out, it was originally invented as a nationalist political counter-concept of sorts – an imagination of a nation state emerging from people who spoke alike, ate alike, and thought alike – intended to gather resistance against a foreign ruling class (in this case, Germans and a French aristocracy, respectively).
Culture, in other words, was and is inherently oppositional. It is an act of refusal; what you will not do. If strategy is the tool of the managerial class, which there is strong historical evidence to suggest, it stands to reason that culture will forever rebel against it.
But here is where it gets complicated.
Culture is not only what can come to be, or what should be, but also what is. It is how we (within the firm, and the firm itself) behave; the emerging movements that ultimately won, just as how culture in a broader sense is.
This leads to a rather interesting set of corollaries. Whether challenger or victor, groups define their cultural fidelity through schismogenesis, that is to say, against their proverbial neighbors. By extension, if prevalent culture is characterized by success, there has to be an inflection point at which it stops punching up and begins punching down. Paradoxically, cultural defiance must thus eventually turn into an enforcing of - not challenging of - the status quo.
From this follows another inevitable conclusion: if culture indeed is (by its very nature) a counter-movement, it must perpetually rebel against itself in a series of evolutionary cycles of what one might call cultural destruction. Company culture ultimately can, therefore, perhaps best be described as a phenomenon that emerges despite, not because, managerial attempts to maintain what preceded it.
This appears to echo practical experience. Managers, looking for smoothness and predictability, do their best to avoid cultural disruption (though they can stand a lot to gain from it); even those quickest to proclaim that they defy orthodoxy rarely do much else than impose their own.
As a result, the company suffers a systemic inertia of sorts. Whenever accepted company wisdom is challenged, the response is not one of critical self-assessment but of reflexive defense of the old ways. The problem, the argument goes, lies not in the dominant culture. Rather, the reason why it failed to hold up in the particular instance was due to it not being strong enough; there were, as the original antagonist claimed, cultural weaknesses.
It echoes a common issue in strategy. Habitually, companies will stick to a strategic plan in spite of changing circumstances. Adaptation is seen as a form of weakness, or lack of belief in the original work. In both cases, failing to understand change causes drift - in business strategy, a gradual deterioration of relative competitiveness; in business culture, a gradual deterioration of competitive relatability.
I digress.
The point is that culture, in the proper sense of the word, will forever be a struggle between oppositional forces, the new and the old, strengthened and weakened by the ebb and flow of human agency, lived histories and constructed narratives, in an ever-changing, interconnected, context-dependent, complex environment. As such, it has more in common with strategy than not.
The suggestion that one would eat the other for breakfast consequently appears nonsensical. A more accurate description would be that they both fit on the same plate and enhance each other’s flavors.
Until next time, have a lovely weekend.
Onwards and upwards,
JP
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