All these culture commentaries are spreading like a virus, it seems, and each time I hear something new about culture my eyes roll a little further than they did the last time. My favorite analogy unnecessarily pits culture against strategy: culture eats strategy for breakfast. Huh? Culture and strategy are two entities most reasonable people generally assume are not in opposition (and certainly not figuring out their positions on the food chain). And must we really resort to dismissing strategy, dear reader, just because we want to talk about culture? Strategy does come in handy from time to time, I've learned.
Now, I'll back up briefly and state that I do understand the general concept of emphasizing culture. There is a certain day-to-day resilience required for any form of success. The challenge to remain disciplined allows organizations, teams, or individuals to use their limited time effectively in marching on towards a distant goal or outcome. I think culture is a good catch-all term to summarize the required mentality for this part of the process.
But must we dismiss the value of strategy? It seems like strategy comes in handy, especially in the face of a crisis. I don't want my trauma surgeons to operate in a Culture Of Suturing; I want them to know what the fuck they are doing.
Strategy also comes in handy in the face of a competitor. If two companies go head-to-head in the market and their products only have marginal differences, is the company with the better culture going to win? I have absolutely no clue. But I do not recall ever trying to decide among burger purchases and thinking gee, I wonder if BK has a better culture than Mickey D's?
Ben Horowitz points out in The Hard Things About Hard Things that a lot of business books are written about successful organizations in expanding markets. Most of the time, the organizations profiled are under no serious threat from outside forces. If you accept this statement, reader, as I did, it will logically follow that most books glorifying businesses and their leaders will focus on culture rather than strategy. It’s not that there is one or the other, really, it’s more that culture is always there while strategy comes up every once in a blue moon.
The best way to put it might be that culture is what happens when no cares to look while strategy is what matters when all eyes are on you. A strong culture might inform the strategy and determine how prepared the team is to execute. But in the final analysis, it does seem like success in competitive environments ultimately comes down to whether a team gets its strategy right.
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I'll use a comparison of helmet football teams to make my point. The top two teams in the past few years have been the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. Both teams boasted strong winning cultures throughout this period while also regularly executing their meticulously crafted strategies during important games. But if I had to determine the priority for each organization, I would say Seattle exemplified a team built around its culture while New England defined an organization set on executing its strategy.
The stories about the team’s quarterbacks provide an interesting starting point for the comparison. When Pete Carroll took over the Seattle head coaching job several years ago, he brought in quarterback after quarterback to fill his most important position. He rolled with incumbent Matt Hasselbeck in his first year, then somehow survived a year with Tarvaris Jackson. Going into a critical third season, he appeared ready to start Matt Flynn, a promising backup just signed from Green Bay. The coach spent the offseason preparing an offense to suit Flynn’s strengths as a quarterback and prepared his team to make a run for a playoff spot.
But in the third round of the season’s college draft, Carroll selected Russell Wilson, a highly decorated player coming out of Wisconsin. Many scouts dismissed Wilson as a professional prospect because he was considered too short to succeed at a position where most players stood a few inches taller. I remember reading one scouting report about Wilson suggesting he would have been a top-five pick if he were the same height as Andrew Luck, the year’s top selection who was built with all the prototypical measurements for the position.
Well, all wee-little Russell Wilson did was show up in camp, immediately establish himself with his relentless work ethic, and blow away the coaches with his practice performances. Halfway through the preseason, Carroll named Wilson the starter and the rest, as they say, is history.
What I imagine was the biggest challenge for Carroll was redesigning the offense to fit Wilson. Unlike most quarterbacks, Wilson excels outside the pocket and is able to accurately throw while running at full speed. Since the offense was designed to suit Flynn’s abilities, changing to Wilson was not like just exchanging one pair of shoes for another. I think the more appropriate analogy for changing quarterbacks is to getting a new pair of feet - everything around it would now need to be refitted.
But Carroll went forward with it because he saw how starting Wilson would demonstrate what he wanted the culture of the team to be. For Carroll, the benefit to the culture was the primary concern ahead of the strategic challenge involved in redesigning the offense (not to mention that the strategic concerns are his problem, anyway). Since Wilson became the starter, Seattle has been a team whose success has been based on getting the best players on the field first and designing the strategy to fit the capabilities of those players second.
On the other hand, when Bill Belichick became the head coach of New England, it seemed like the one thing he didn’t need to consider was his quarterback. Drew Bledsoe was already there on a long-term deal. When he drafted Tom Brady in the sixth round of his first draft, it wasn’t like he grabbed some hidden gem of a prospect. Brady was not dismissed by incompetent scouts lacking the imagination required to understand how big talents are sometimes hidden in Wilson-sized bodies. No, Brady was a sixth-round pick simply because he wasn’t good enough to be a fifth-round pick.
When Brady started his career, he did not get named the starter and the offense was not redesigned to fit his strengths. Belichick recognized his potential and simply waited until he was a better option than Bledsoe. The coach’s hand was forced when Bledsoe was injured in the second game of Brady’s second season. During his time filling in, Brady’s development accelerated and his performances convinced the coach that he was now the better option than Bledsoe. And the rest, as they say…
I don't think the challenge involved for Belichick was the same as it was for Carroll. For Belichick, picking Brady ahead of Bledsoe was a matter of assessing the better player for his team and its strategy. When it became clear who the better player was, Belichick picked him. He didn’t need to change the strategy for this to happen because the rest of the team – a savvy defense, a top special teams unit, and a tough running game – dictated the strategy for him. Brady fit the strategy and thus got the assignment.
I’ve heard some say culture defines how things are done while strategy dictates who, what, and when those things will get done. These definitions help explain what I think about when I consider these teams after their coaches selected their quarterbacks.
For Seattle, I think about the team’s unity, a quality evident both in close games and in how their players speak openly about social issues. I think about ‘The Legion of Boom’, a nickname for their secondary, and how it describes their style rather than their tactics. I think about The 12th Man, the nickname given to their home crowd, a group of fans who make Seattle a near-impossible place to play with their noise, enthusiasm, and belief. These all describe the ‘how’ of Seattle, the culture of team, in terms of their approach to issues both on and off the field.
It’s not like New England lacks any of these things. They, too, care about the country’s issues. Their defenses have boasted many hard-hitting players and their teams openly express their admiration and appreciation for the dedication of their fans. But when I think about New England, my mind drifts back to the strategy. I remember how they jettisoned major contributors like Milloy, Vinatieri, and Seymour once they no longer fit the team’s strategy. I remember how they traded Randy Moss because the offense operated better in tight spaces while Moss preferred to run free deep downfield. I remember all the times Belichick proved his vastly superior knowledge of the tactical elements of helmet football – intentional safeties, new formations pulled from college games, going for it on fourth own.
Most of all, I remember the most famous play from the most important game these teams played. It was Super Bowl XLIX, played in February 2015, and the two teams battled to a near stalemate for fifty-nine minutes. It came down to one yard, a yard that would determine victory, and Seattle’s offense prepared to take this yard from a New England defense determined to hold it.
No doubt about it, Seattle was ready for the moment. For Seattle, how to gain the last yard was the answer to the culture question. Their team’s mental toughness in close games proved time and again the necessary ingredient for maintaining the focus required to execute a winning play and complete the victory. The pressure most teams would feel in such a situation would be overwhelming but Seattle, for sure, welcomed it, thrived in it, lived for it. The unity required to stand together and face the challenge was built into the culture from day one of the season and, in some ways, all the way back to the first day of Carroll’s tenure. The task was immense but they knew how to accomplish it.
But New England, too, knew what to do. For them, a matter of a yard was a question of strategy – what do we do to prevent Seattle from advancing these last three feet? They knew what to do because they knew what Seattle would do. They lined up Malcolm Butler behind Brandon Browner and Butler cut off Wilson’s pass, the same pass he practiced defending all week, because New England knew what Seattle would do, and he fell down with the ball just inches in front of the goal line. And how appropriate for the hero to be named Butler, appropriate because he simply knew exactly what he was supposed to do to serve the team and he did nothing more than exactly what he was supposed to serve the team. The game was over a minute later and the Patriots were, narrowly, the champions.
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So I suppose this example settles the matter, in a way, or at least provides a very compelling ally for those who dispute the whole 'culture eats strategy for breakfast' conclusion. And it is usually the case that the sorts of generalizations I might find emerging from a fortune cookie don’t make for the most definite insights into big ideas like the relationship between culture and strategy. At the very least, we have some evidence for helmet football: culture fought strategy and strategy won, though only just.
But a part of me can’t help but think this is the exception proving the rule. How many lives have moments like the one from the Super Bowl? Mine certainly won’t. The closest I'll ever be to Butler is cutting in front of an old woman in order to just get onto a Red Line train before the doors close. A real American hero I'll be on that day...
I’m in the middle of a job search at the moment, one I’m sure will end soon, and my life will return to being a lot like most others. I’ll go to work and, pooling the expensively accumulated knowledge, skills, and experiences from the near three decades of my life, make the occasional strategic decision that will have no discernible impact whatsoever on anyone’s actual strategy. Maybe, at best, a decision I make will have a slightly noticeable effect on something or someone at some time in the medium to long-term future.
Then I’ll go home, maybe to a family or a house or a dog or, if things don’t change much, to a book or a room or a blog, and talk or think or write about these trivial little strategic decisions that don’t seem to add up anywhere actually visible. I better work in a strong culture, I think, under those circumstances. I'm really going to need to believe in how I’m doing my work because otherwise I’m going to struggle with carrying on the charade of how the work I’m doing is anything but mediocre or trivial or irrelevant.
The reason all these companies I've talked to over the past two years stress the importance of their cultures is because for most people the culture is the only relevant thing. Culture is what happens when no one is watching. And I'll just break the news now to save you all the suspense: at my next job, no one will be watching. Without a firm belief in the culture, who knows how I'll perform?
I’m not sure how strong cultures add up but I do recognize it when it manifests. And again, I'll borrow an example from helmet football here. Such a moment came just this past year during a soon to be forgotten Sunday night in Seattle. The Seahawks were playing the Indianapolis Colts and, although the game was close for a short time, Seattle pulled away to take a big lead in the fourth quarter.
On one of the game’s final plays, Wilson handed the ball to rookie Chris Carson. Carson is a guy who exemplifies Seattle's culture. He came in with no fanfare as a seventh round draft selection. All he did was show up in camp, immediately establish himself with his relentless work ethic, and blow away the coaches with his practice performances. By the time of this play, Carson was locked in as the starting running back. At the end of it, Carson was lying on the turf with leg snapped back after it got locked under a pair defenders.
It was one of those plays where, even as a half-asleep fan lying on the couch, I immediately knew something was wrong. Wilson was the first indication - he dove on all fours next to where the players were piled. Next came the waving from others, the universal signal in helmet football to get the doctors on the field, right now. The network then made its graceful, practiced cut to commercial so the player could be treated in relative privacy. I suppose the rest of us sat around at home, stared at the car commercials, and wondered just how many more of these scenes we could take before we stopped watching this mess every week.
When the game came back on, I was expecting the usual: a player limping off, maybe, or sitting on the back of a cart, fans and players clapping a little bit to acknowledge the player’s sacrifice, a coach firing up the squad to get back out there and win one for the fallen teammate. So I was stunned instead when NBC came on and showed what appeared to be half the Seattle team on the field, each player trying to get close enough to Carson to pat him on the head, slap his hand, or give him a consoling word before the trainers drove him off the field for further treatment.
It was a scene I’m sure I’ve never seen on a football field. And that isn’t to mean teams never come onto the field to support an injured teammate. It isn't even a comment about Seattle, really. I'm sure teams come out onto the field all time for their injured teammates. And since culture is what happens when no one is looking, it would be careless of me to assume that what goes on behind the scenes of these telecasts demonstrates nothing but the love and admiration players have for the sacrifices made by their teammates.
The point is that culture is how things are done when it doesn’t add up to wins and profits. It’s what happens when someone is down and needs a lift back up. The way Seattle responded to Carson demonstrated what a culture means. It was an idea I hadn't really considered since half my company showed up at my mom's wake to just say hang in there, man. Watching how Seattle responded to Carson's injury reminded me of exactly what I’m looking for now as I seek out the next team I’ll work in and, maybe in the process, helped me understand a little better why some so adamantly believe in their truisms about how culture relates to strategy.
