At some point in their careers, most executives come across management guru Peter Drucker’s dictum that culture “eats strategy over breakfast” (or lunch, depending on the version they read). Drucker’s point was that culture takes priority over, and can in fact derail, any strategy one might pursue in the course of fulfilling an organization’s mission. That is, any strategy that fails to be generated by, or account for, culture has the potential to itself be thwarted.

While this adage seems to be oft-repeated, the primacy of culture in business contexts doesn’t seem to be well understood. Just do a simple web search, and you’ll find scores of presentations, opinion pieces, books and the like that claim to help you discover the Holy Grail of Culture. Yet a good deal of this information seems to me to be confused.

For example, in much of the commentary I’ve found, culture is referred to as something “fuzzy,” or “soft.” It’s that mysterious answer given whenever the data fails to explain something. This is a common, but misleading, way of thinking about culture, in my view. Rather, culture, when properly understood, is far more fundamental, and less fuzzy than we’ve all been led to believe.

Let me give you an example of this confusion. It comes from a leading consulting firm that has a webinar presentation online about culture eating strategy. According to the presentation, culture is an organization’s “self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing.” That’s going in the right direction, as culture does have something to do with patterns of behavior and thought. But this is juxtaposed with a fascinating metaphor used in the same presentation, that is: “Culture is the oil that makes the company’s value creation engine run frictionless.” Which is to say, culture is additive. In other words, it’s something you pour into another structure to generate smooth performance.

This is completely backwards. If we examine the automotive metaphor, it would be more accurate to say that culture is itself the engine of an organization. Far from being a mere additive extra, culture is the ultimate value creation structure, both the source and the shape of behavior, thinking, and, ultimately, strategy. It’s not the other way around. As we all know from experience, no amount of gasoline and oil will help a car without an engine. It’s the car itself, after all, that transports us from place to place – not the oil and gas.

This, ultimately, is what Drucker was getting at. Strategy functions more as the additives of fuel and oil do to an engine: if you use the wrong type – say, putting diesel in an unleaded engine – you’re just going to muck the whole thing up and paralyze your ability to move. Culture is not something you can merely tinker with; you have to build it from the ground up, often with parts you’ve inherited. Of course, there are better and worse ways to do that, a topic that we’ll explore in future posts.