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Introduction
It serves to benefit a firm if it knows and understands whether its strategy leads to a complimentary culture, or whether its culture determines the strategy its executives and managers formulate and implement. The peculiarities in the link between culture and strategy is worthy of research and investigation. The reason for this is that it is not easily discernible whether the strategy being executed was formulated driven by cultural influences or whether culture was just a major influence for implementation. This becomes apparent when one looks at how the links between culture and strategy have been established. The statement “culture determines and limits strategy” is mentioned in a book by Edgar Schein (1985), who also mentions in quotations “culture constrains strategy,” as a phrase apparently being in prevalence. The phrase “culture beats strategy” became popular in the 1980s–1990s. Many acquisitions, mergers, restructuring and business process reengineering strategies failed during this timeframe (Daft, 2000). The “beats” was later replaced by “eats.” “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a more famous quote attributed to Peter Drucker, although there is no source reference of him having said it (Anders, 2016; Anon, 2017). Possibly, it was mentioned in a private conversation. However, the quote has been made legendary by Mark Fields, President of Ford (Durbin, 2006). To bring home the need to become competitive again managers hung up a banner with this quote at Ford (McCracken, 2006).
Yet, the quotes earliest reference is an article in a paper industry trade journal that attributes it to the Giga Information Group’s March periodical (Moore and Rose, 2000). The term “breakfast” was replaced with “lunch” (Mason, 2000). Other variants are “dinner,” with addition of words like “every day, every time.” The phrase “culture trumps strategy” came out of another quote “the whole team and the culture trumps strategy” by a skin care products entrepreneur Eli Halliwell (Lehmann, 2006). “Culture eats strategy for lunch” appears as a quote of Merck CEO Richard Clark (Meehan et al., 2008). The “breakfast” quote once again is referred to as an apparent quote of Peter Drucker (Campbell et al., 2011). “Culture trumps strategy, every time” appeared in an HBR article with the same name (Merchant, 2011). The saying with “lunch” in it gets attributed...