Culture

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.--Peter Drucker

Culture.

Our culture includes our inherited ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge derived from our experiences. We can speak of a national culture or a company culture or a religious culture, but in practical terms, think of the culture of a community. Like communities, you may operate in multiple cultures, one at home and a different one at work. A cultured individual is one who exhibits expected behaviors in upper crust society. Culture contains art, music, dance and literature. The culture surrounds us and presses us to conform to what is expected by the majority. Culture is a very powerful force, hence the quote above from Drucker. But it is not monolithic; there are many layers within a culture, such as the sub-culture of teen-agers or bikers or suburban moms in a certain part of town.

Politics operates within and around culture. Culture constitutes those common practices that are so pervasive in the environment that they need not be written, but are universally understood. Culture is a product of socialization. Our socialization affects what we value, how we seek power, how we use influence, and how we respond to authority. The culture describes the “what is,” the actuality of how an organizational environment operates: the patterns created as everyone interacts. To culture is to grow or nurture.

In addition to common practices, every culture also has policies, processes and procedures that are the result of persons acting on their own priorities and interacting with others in the same environment over time. Policies, processes and procedures are the result of organizational politics over time, they make up the “rules of the game of politics.” The rules might not be written and they may, or may not, be consistently followed; but players know the rules exist. They represent “what ought to be” as modeled by the organization’s leaders.