David Lancefield argues that strategy and culture should be developed together. His article rejects the familiar choice between a plan for where to compete and the behaviors through which people work. It recommends connecting strategy and HR teams, learning how the existing culture operates, using consequential moments to model desired behavior, and aligning capabilities, resources, and incentives with strategic intent. This is more practical than treating culture as a poster of values.
The remaining problem is the assumption that tighter alignment is inherently desirable. A culture can execute a strategy coherently, consistently, and enthusiastically while the strategy itself is mistaken.
Alignment reduces friction, but some friction is information. Employees who question a risky expansion, resist a sales target, or protect professional standards may look culturally out of step. They may also be the earliest warning that the plan's assumptions are failing. If leaders define the desired culture from the strategy and then use recruitment, performance reviews, stories, and informal influencers to reinforce it, dissent can be classified as a behavior problem before it is evaluated as evidence.
The article encourages participation in strategy development, which is valuable, yet participation is not the same as power. A dream session can collect ideas while senior leaders retain every consequential choice. A town hall can communicate transparency without giving employees access to the financial assumptions behind a decision. Informal leaders can carry messages through the organization, but they can also become an unofficial compliance layer whose influence has neither a clear mandate nor accountability.
"Culture" also absorbs mechanisms that deserve more precise names. Compensation, benefits, tools, budgets, reporting lines, and performance measures are not only expressions of shared beliefs. They are material conditions and management choices. If collaboration is praised while bonuses reward individual output, the issue is not a mysterious cultural gap. The organization has designed a conflict. Describing that conflict as culture can shift responsibility from the people who set the rules to the people expected to behave around them.
The business case is similarly easy to overread. A mall operator's recovery after freezing rents may illustrate a productive relationship with tenants, but a rebound does not isolate culture as the cause. Location, consumer demand, public policy, capital access, and competitors also matter. Executive surveys showing that leaders value culture establish belief, not the incremental effect of a particular culture program. Leaders should be cautious about turning a plausible story into a general method.
A stronger connection would include institutionalized challenge. Strategic assumptions should be published internally with owners and review dates. Teams should identify indicators that could disconfirm the plan, not only behaviors that support it. Performance systems should reward the responsible escalation of bad news. Employee participation should show where input changed a decision, and leaders should explain when it did not. Some roles—risk, safety, compliance, audit, and professional practice—need enough independence to resist strategic pressure rather than align with it.
The addendum is that culture should not merely make strategy easier to execute. It should help the organization discover when strategy deserves resistance or revision. The healthiest connection is therefore not perfect fit but productive tension: enough shared purpose to coordinate action, enough material consistency to make stated values credible, and enough protected dissent to prevent coherence from becoming collective error. A company that behaves exactly as its strategy requires may still be moving efficiently in the wrong direction.