In my firm’s frequent conversations with board directors, C-suite executives, and HR leaders, we continually hear the same refrain as companies hit the reset button for life beyond the pandemic: “We are rethinking everything.” We should apply this healthy impulse to the popular business expressions that inform reinvention — but that may have outlived their usefulness. Let’s start with the oft-quoted line “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
One of the first business books I reviewed, back in 1992, was Corporate Culture and Performance, by Harvard Business School professors James Heskett and John Kotter. A few books explored organizational culture before it, most notably In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and the late Robert Waterman, but Corporate Culture and Performance was the first to try to quantify the economic returns of culture in a rigorous way.
