Intermezzo: Culture eats Strategy for hors d’oeuvres and then some

Don’t you ‘amuse gueulle/bouche’ me …! Why change a winning team name, right?

Also, Drucker’s thing on strategy isn’t the only thing. There’s other things, e.g., qua regulations and ‘control’ here.
TL;DR incl my elucidation: Controls stifle, lead to stagnation – and

  • Are ineffective, as they almost by definition don’t least resistance enable the ‘safest’ procedures to be followed naturally but coax users away from that hence introduce severe friction against which users will put their energy more than against actual downside risks to achieve the upside potentials. So any control that you deem necessary, will be rendered useless as a first priority.
  • Were never intended as a management ‘control’ thing! Management control is about steering and giving out orders [with a huge, huge bandwidth for Commander’s Intent …!!] and it definitely has zero to do with micromanagement and enslavement. The latter, not too strong a word…
  • Are the exact opposite of what you need to succeed. Having a hierarchical ‘framework’ of controls, preferably without ‘risk’ in every line, might have once suited vast army control. But your organisation isn’t an army, on the contrary qua success it’s an inverted pyramid! And even armies nowadays have to deal with guerrillas and IEDs etc. in every outpost corner of ‘business’; the ‘one step forward across the entire continent-wide front’ no longer applies, does it? Edited to add: I’m not even making this up; If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more. [Eric Shinseki, Retired US Army General]

Only the most trivial of (e.g., anti-fraud) controls may need to be in place, but if you need those, you’ve already lost since you demonstrably have lost the primary motivation of your employees to work with the company as they now at best don’t care a thing just pay for presence. You need guide rails not train rail tracks. The outside world, and your inside world, will derail you (all) in an instant.

So please stop the fellow travellers of the GRC world. Get to the real work in that. But then, ‘culture’ can’t be controlled per checklist. Oh my.
Plus: This.

And:

[Use one of these; Twente AFB a long time ago when analog picsslides (this one a scan from _ even…) were the B/A or rather only/A]

Leave a Reply

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord