Culture Beats Strategy: Rules vs Norms

Leadership is felt. Only management can be measured.

One of the axioms that has emerged from the organizational leadership literature is something along the lines of “Culture beats strategy.” George Anders (writing on Quora) traces the idea back to this quote from the 1985 edition of Organizational Culture and Leadership:

Culture determines and limits strategy.
-- Edgar Schein.

Popular variations on this meme like “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” are often attributed to the late management guru Peter Drucker, but I agree with Anders when he says it doesn’t sound like something Drucker would say, and in any case it doesn’t appear anywhere in Drucker’s writings. In fact, Drucker is more often quoted for having said something very different (that he probably didn’t say, either) like “What gets measured, gets managed,” or “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” or something else along those lines that might also be attributed to W. Edwards Deming.

While the meme on management and measurement might be true, what these famous scholars of quality and management actually wrote was intended to have the opposite effect.

It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — a costly myth.
— W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics, p35 (from John Hunter at the…