Culture and strategy
Introduction
In the strategic literature the need to develop a strategy that requires the foundations of a culture that is compatible with the intended strategy is widely recognized. However, what is less widely understood is what happens when you have to fast track both cultural and strategic change when the strategy and its desired outcomes are both incompatible with the culture of the organization. How should managers deal with these challenges? How should such cultural appreciations be brought in to the discussion to develop and implement the business strategy?

Cultural change is strategic change
It is important to understand cultural change as also involving strategic change. Strategy can be considered as a cultural production that may involve cultural adaptation, or transformation, or both. This conceptualization is particularly useful if the organization is “betwixt and between” cultures and organizational identities i.e. a local authority department aspiring to become a commercially driven company. I will use a case study of such an organization that was changing from a council department into a Limited Liability Partnership to flesh out some ideas that illuminate the relationship between strategic development and organizational culture.

Culture is not like a skin that an organization can discard as it selects a new organizational culture that is perceived to have strategic fit with its commercial strategy. In my view culture is the organization. Therefore, when an organization faces considerable market forces to change its strategy it can not simply change its culture at will to avoid cultural and strategic incompatibility. The organization has to recognize the miss match between its culture and its strategy and factor the cultural change process in terms of time and resources into its strategic change programme. Many