“Culture” is the “miasma“ of management theories.
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Disagree - I think it's easy to understand if a culture is broken and understand how to change it. It's actually just really hard to actually change it.
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That last clause means you don’t understand how to change it, and your idea of how it’s broken is a just-so theory that doesn’t work. What looks like “broken culture” is nearly always referred pain from something else invisible. “Culture” can’t actually break. It’s not a machine.
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In smaller orgs, the major issue is the board / C-suite not wanting to make hard choices: ie do a layoff + replace a lot of managers and start performance mgmt on ICs to turn the culture over. That's not an understanding problem, but a power/buy-in problem.
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Culture can "break" as in get dysfunctional. The questions are: Are your values / org systems still valid for your current mission/strategy? Are you actually hiring people / running things according to these values? It's pretty straightforward to know these things actually.
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You're describing certain problem diagnosis and solving behaviors that work for you in "culture" language, but it doesn't mean that's the "correct" way of thinking about them. It's a conceptual UI that works for you. IME it's a bad one that creates a cognitive tax.
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As in believing in miasma theory might still lead you to do effective things like isolating yourself form others to avoid catching a disease etc. It's just inefficient and may not work if things don't coincidentally line up.
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Sure, thinking in terms of values is not the only way to align current mission with functional capabilities. There is more than one kind of effective hiring-for-fit approach than looking for "cultural" alignment (eg. "who can get the currently bottlenecked projects unstuck").
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Ie the "culture eats strategy" type delusion is a two-step conflation.
1. Step 1: confusing a set of behaviors that seem to work with the ONLY set of behaviors that COULD work
2. Step 2: confusing that set with the preferred abstractions you use to understand it
Like, I often use the OODA/Blitzkrieg model as the basis for consulting. Depending on how you look at it, the "pieces" of that theory could be interpreted in a "culture" way or not, depending on the personal preferred style of the executive.

