Corporate Culture and Leadership - Keys to Effective Strategy Execution - Review Notes

Based Chapter of Thompson and Strickland



The beliefs, goals, and practices called for in a strategy may be compatible with a
firm’s culture or they may not. When they are not, a company usually finds it difficult
to implement the strategy successfully. A close culture-strategy match that energizes
People throughout the company to do their jobs in a strategy-supportive manner adds
significantly to the power and effectiveness of strategy execution.

When a company’s culture is out of sync with what is needed for strategic success, the culture has to be changed as rapidly as can be managed. A sizable and prolonged strategy-culture conflict weakens and may even defeat managerial efforts to make the strategy work.
A strong culture and a tight culture-strategy alignment is a powerful lever for channeling behavior and for influencing employees do their jobs in a more strategy-supportive manner.

It is the strategy-maker’s responsibility to understand the company culture, and select a strategy compatible with the “sacred” or unchangeable parts of prevailing corporate culture. He also has to foresee how he is going to change the culture to support the strategy that he is proposing. During the strategy implementation, it is an important task, , once strategy is chosen, to change whatever facets of the corporate culture hinder effective execution.


Changing a company’s culture and aligning it with strategy are among the toughest
management tasks--easier to talk about than do. Thompson and Stickland advocate that managers have to talk openly and forthrightly to all concerned about those aspects of
the culture that have to be changed. The talk has to be followed swiftly by visible
actions to modify the culture-actions that everyone will understand are intended to
establish a new culture more in tune with the strategy.

What makes a spirit of high performance come alive is a complex network of
practices, words, symbols, styles, values, and policies pulling together that produces
extraordinary results with ordinary people.

Presentation slides
http://www.ryerson.ca/~kjensen/CHAP013.ppt

Full Chapter (Only culture portion)

Organizational culture - a note

Strategy For Success Needs to be Supported by Culture - Research report by Booz and Company

Video presentations on corporate and company culture

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Updated on 31.5.2012

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