This is why many business leaders waste half their effort and don’t even know it!

There is an old adage in advertising that says: “I know that half my advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half”. In many cases, we know that all of it is wasted.

So it is with strategy and culture. Most senior business leaders spend considerable time on strategy – and rightly so. We do need to know where we are trying to go. But much less time – and sometimes virtually none – is devoted the other “half”: culture.

Some pundits believe “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. But that is beside the point. Business leaders need strength in both or at least half their effort will be wasted – and sometimes all of it. The strategy sets the direction and culture delivers (either well or poorly) the value of the strategy to the marketplace.

Our experience in many organizations across the globe is that the biggest missing piece is a customer-centric culture that is aligned with a customer-centric strategy. Repeatedly we find a lack of alignment between the stated strategy and what people are doing. Also, we see, more frequently, strategies that attempt to address and create customer value but the culture is not aligned with delivering to meet customer needs and desired customer experiences.

Aligning Customer Strategy and Culture

You just need to see the disruption occurring in so many industries and almost from observation you can predict impending corporate collapse. Which retailers will survive? Which health services will prosper? It will be only those that develop a strategy centered on customer value and experience with a customer-centric culture across the entire organization that has the capabilities to deliver it.

If you have a question about the adequacy of your culture and believe you are not in the right-hand top box in the diagram, you should start by measuring it and benchmarking where you stand against the world’s best customer-centric companies. To discover the next steps on what you need to do, have a look at the groundbreaking book: The Customer Culture Imperative.

AND if you want to build this capability in your organization check out our MarketCulture Academy.