Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

by Jacquelyn Davis, Managing Partner

Why High-Performing Organizations Build Culture as Intentionally as Strategy

Peter Drucker’s famous line — “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” — endures because leaders experience its truth every day. We sometimes see organizations with brilliant strategic plans, spot-on theories of change, and ambitious growth targets, yet still struggle to execute, adapt, and sustain performance. The missing ingredient is often not strategy or implementation efforts. It is culture.

Strategy and culture are the two primary levers leaders have at their disposal in the ongoing effort to sustain organizational effectiveness and long-term impact. Both matter. But they play fundamentally different roles — and when misaligned, culture will almost always win – or in other words, cause strategy to fail.

Strategy Defines the “What”

Strategy provides a formal logic for an organization’s goals and how it intends to achieve them. It clarifies priorities, allocates resources, and orients people toward shared outcomes. At its best, strategy articulates an organization’s theory of change — what the organization uniquely believes will create impact and why.

For example:

• A workforce development nonprofit might believe that deep employer partnerships — rather than high enrollment volume — drive long-term wage mobility for participants.

• A philanthropic organization may focus on systems change and policy leverage instead of direct service delivery to achieve population-level outcomes.

In each case, strategy defines the role the organization will play in a larger ecosystem and how it believes its actions will move the needle toward its mission. Strategy is visible and tangible. It can be captured in plans, dashboards, operating models, and milestones. Strategy is the what of the work.

Culture Defines the How

Culture expresses goals through values, beliefs, and shared assumptions. It shapes how people actually behave when no one is watching. It governs how decisions get made, how conflict is handled, how risk is approached, how accountability functions, and how people treat one another.

Culture is often described as “the water we swim in.” It is pervasive, implicit, and powerful. It shows up in everyday behaviors, informal norms, stories people tell, who gets rewarded, who gets promoted, and what gets quietly tolerated.

Unlike strategy, culture is rarely documented neatly. Leaders shape culture through both conscious and unconscious actions — sometimes with unintended consequences. What leaders model consistently matters far more than what they say once in a town hall.

Culture is the how of the work.

Why Culture So Often Undermines Strategy

In our experience, building a high-performing organization requires building a high-performing culture. Even the strongest strategic leadership can be hobbled when culture is neglected.

Consider common scenarios:

• A strategy emphasizes innovation, but the culture punishes risk and failure.

• A strategy calls for collaboration, but incentives reward individual heroics.

• A strategy demands speed and adaptability, but decision-making remains slow and hierarchical.

When culture and strategy are misaligned, employees default to cultural norms — not strategic directives. This is why culture eats strategy for breakfast.

The good news: it does not have to be this way. Culture can — and should — be designed with the same intentionality as strategy.

Make Culture Explicit and Actionable

Culture is not simply “how people feel” at work. It consists of concrete norms that define what is expected, encouraged, discouraged, and rejected inside the organization. While the academic literature on culture is vast, several practical principles consistently matter for leaders.

1. Culture Must Be Shared

Culture exists at the group level, not the individual level. It reflects shared values, behaviors, and assumptions that are collectively practiced and reinforced. Every individual contributes to culture — but no one owns it alone.

High-performing cultures create clarity about “how we operate here” so that people can coordinate effectively, especially under pressure.

2. Culture Must Be Pervasive

Culture permeates multiple levels of the organization. It shows up in:

• How meetings run

• How decisions get made

• How conflict is surfaced and resolved

• How information flows

• How people onboard and exit

• What stories get told and retold

It can even appear in physical environments, e.g., how desks are set up, who has what offices, etc. Culture is about rituals, language, and symbols. Culture shapes mindsets, motivations, and daily behavior far beyond formal policies.

3. Culture Must Be Enduring and Modeled

Culture must be consistent over time and visibly modeled by leadership. People do what they see, not just what they are told.

Hiring and promotion decisions should assess cultural alignment and embodiment alongside technical and skill competence. Skills can often be trained; values and behaviors are much harder to shift. How team members “perform” on culture – the values, behavior, and beliefs they exhibit – are as, if not more, important than performance on goals. 

Leaders must ask: Are we reinforcing the behaviors we say we value — or the behaviors that merely deliver short-term results?

4. Culture Must Be Explicit

While culture often feels implicit, high-performing organizations make it explicit. They clearly articulate:

• Core values

• Behavioral expectations

• Decision norms

• Accountability standards

They make culture visible and measurable:

• Cultural behaviors are embedded into performance reviews.

• Leaders provide concrete feedback tied to values and norms.

• Teams use shared language to reinforce expectations.

When culture is explicit, people know what “good” looks like — not just in outcomes, but in conduct.

Aligning Culture to Strategy

Culture should not exist independently of strategy. It must actively support the organization’s strategic goals.

If a strategy requires innovation, culture must reward experimentation and learning.

If a strategy requires collaboration, culture must reinforce trust and shared ownership.

If a strategy requires operational excellence, culture must prioritize discipline and accountability.

The most effective organizations deliberately align their cultural norms with their strategic intent.

The Leadership Imperative

Culture is not soft work. It is leadership work.

Organizations that treat culture as accidental or secondary often struggle with execution, morale, retention, and adaptability. Organizations that invest intentionally in culture build resilience, alignment, and sustained performance.

At Volution Advisors, we consistently see that the highest-impact organizations treat culture development with the same rigor as strategic planning. They define it, measure it, reinforce it, and evolve it as their organization grows.

Because in the end, culture doesn’t just eat strategy for breakfast — it determines whether strategy ever gets implemented at all.

[Stay tuned for Volution’s Culture Checklist coming Thursday.]