When culture eats breakfast

According to Mark Fields, who was heading up Ford Motor Co. in the Americas in 2006, Peter Drucker has once said that:

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And even if I have not really found any evidence that Drucker has used exactly the words in question, there is still something very true in this quote. Because you can have the best of strategies, devised the sharpest brains in a management team, often even with the help of external consultants - if you do not have a proper culture in the company, it does not matter.

As I have seen Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla like to be one of the hottest hotshots in corporate management these days, quoted:

Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.

- and it expresses the same in a way for even nerds like me to be able to understand it.
Business culture is what it takes to make sure that all the vectors that a company consist of point in roughly the same direction. If the culture is sick, and the vectors point all over the place, then even the finest strategy is close to no good.
(Translated from Når kulturen spiser morgenmad)

A matter of silence

Image courtesy of pixabay / Predra6

As surely a number of other people, I am somewhat preoccupied with the question of how to ensure quality in what one expresses in daily life; how to ensure quality in communication, so to speak - basically, how do I ensure that I express something that people are at all interested in listening to? For I do not hesitate to draw the conclusion that if I just occasionally end up in the situation where I'm not worth listening to, it will be all too easy for people to generalize that I am not worth listening to at all.
And then it struck me in its simplicity; one of these every day revelations which I sometimes experience: this is most likely obvious to the world, but I still feel a need to disclose it, as I find it so universally valid: when communicating, one should confine oneself to expressing things that can stand a very simple test: would I find this interesting if the roles were reversed, and someone else said it to me?
I think that if in general, we use this - let's call it a mirror principle, eventhough I know that Peter Drucker proposed such one has long ago - silence would be much more prevalent in the world, and what was said would be of a higher quality.
Paradoxically - it's probably so obvious to everyone that merely by discussing the principle, I myself violate it.
(Translated from En formel for stilhed, originally published September 9, 2013)