Culture is the manner by which an organization’s values are communicated, understood, and lived by its members. Culture exists to help the organization fulfill its purpose.

An analogy may help demonstrate what I mean by this.

A company is an airplane in flight. The pilots are the leadership of the company. The flight plan—-the path they follow from origination to destination—- is the company’s strategy. Culture is the airplane’s flight control system, the mechanism by which the plane is operated and without which it will never reach its intended destination.

Where this analogy breaks down, however, is when it comes to the creation of culture. In an airplane, the flight control system is the product of engineers and production workers. In a company, in a team, or in any other organization, culture emanates from leadership. It is determined by what leadership tolerates and what leadership does not tolerate. These shared values establish the boundaries of acceptable behavior within the organization.

Objections to this contention immediately spring to mind. 1. “If that is true, then why does leadership focus so much attention on strategy and so little on culture?” 2. “Why do so many companies betray their stated values?” 3. “Culture won’t matter once we finally automate everything and get rid of those problematic people.”

The answers to these objections are as follows:

1. Because formulating strategy makes leaders feel powerful while developing culture makes leaders feel humble and leaders prefer the former feeling to the latter. Strategy is perceived as something concrete and the natural province of the captain of industry, whereas culture is perceived as fluffy feeling stuff which ought to be sloughed off on the HR types.

2. Because leadership does not punish behavior inconsistent with cultural values and reward behavior which exemplifies these values. Why don’t they do this? See 1. above.

3. Even robots need guidance as to how they should behave, which was the conceit for Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. The values so articulated represent a culture every bit as vital to success for machines as well as men. Besides, you’ll look in vain for true, lights-out operations for anything but extremely simple operations. While this will change in the future, it is unlikely that the human element will be completely removed at any point within our grandchildren’s lifetimes. We must address the world we have, not the one we imagine.

Lest this introductory post become too dry for the general taste, I will tell you a true story.

When Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, returned from his Elban exile to once again lead France to glory, he was troubled by the lack of quality leaders available to reliably command at the corps level. Most of the legendary field marshals who had carried the golden batons during the Napoleonic Wars were dead. Others had turned against the Corsican Ogre in the service of this king or that. Napoleon accordingly wound up elevating men he didn’t know very well to positions of high rank within his reconstituted army.

One of these was a young noble named Emmanuel de Grouchy. In the opening maneuvers of the Waterloo Campaign, Napoleon charged Marshal Grouchy with an important mission: keep an eye on Marshal Blucher’s Prussian Army and keep it from joining up with the Duke of Wellington’s forces. The French Army, well understanding the impact of the fog of war (having used it to annihilate their enemies at the Battle of Austerlitz and elsewhere), had a standing order which had the impact of a top cultural value: “March to the sound of the guns.” This meant that when in doubt, a corps commander should err on the side of joining a battle in progress.

Grouchy, unfortunately, was not as steeped in the culture of his army as Napoleon had expected, and wound up spending much of the battle marching to and fro without effect after having lost contact with the Prussians and been utterly confused trying to follow outdated and contradictory written orders. Grouchy’s defense was the fog of war, but this ignores the fact that he heard the terrific thunder of the guns on the battlefield and failed to move to immediately join the fight.

As a direct result of this cultural failure, of this inability to live out the culture as communicated, Blucher’s forces burst from the trees at the edge of the battlefield at a pivotal moment and turned the tide of battle in the favor of the Allies. The 100 Days were over. Napoleon was captured and exiled to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where he died five years later, and the Bourbons were restored yet again to the throne of France. Peace reigned (more or less) in Europe until the First World War a century later.

The course of history changed dramatically over an afternoon because one man deviated from the cultural values of his organization. How does such a thing happen? It happens because culture is everything.