Strategy sets the direction. Culture is what gets you there.
You can spend a lot of time building the perfect strategy - the right roadmap, the ideal metrics, the cleanest plan. But culture is what you default to when things get fast, messy, and complex. Strategy on its own is just theory. Culture is how your plans actually come to life.
I'm still learning about this. But these are my reflections so far - and I'm glad I learned early just how critical culture really is. Now I'm focusing more on how I apply it, how I enable it, how I empower others to embody it.
Culture isn't a vibe. It's not a set of posters or buzzwords. It's the behaviours you reward, tolerate, or reject. It's who you hire, promote, and fire. It's the shared judgments you build over time - through stories, through tough conversations, through real examples.
It's how people behave when the path forward isn't obvious. How they ask for help. How they challenge an idea. Whether they feel safe doing either.
Culture is something you build intentionally. You don't just write it down once and move on. You revisit it. You debate it. You live it out loud.
It's what makes decision-making consistent, even when multiple teams are moving fast and working independently.
It's what makes debate productive, not endless.
It's what gives someone the confidence to say mid-demo, “Hold on - are we solving the right problem?”
You turn values into everyday actions. You make space for context, for disagreement done right, for stories that anchor good decisions. You let questions coexist with action - because learning is part of momentum.
Culture isn't a nice-to-have. It's the foundation that enables autonomy. The force that turns motion into progress. The reason good decisions happen, even when no one's watching.
I'm still figuring this out. But the more I learn, the more I realise - it's everything.
Strategy on its own is just theory. Culture is how your plans actually come to life.