Work Culture
Mark Fields’ famous quote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” is spot on in innovation too. What shapes a culture that fuels innovation work? This article digs into that question and gives you a first look.
Bernhard Doll
Business Design Maverick
“Culture” has many definitions, and people understand it in very different ways. In Business Design, we keep it simple: culture is expected behavior. It’s rarely written down, but every employee feels it — directly and indirectly — in what gets rewarded and what gets punished. Most employees adjust their behavior accordingly. Leaders shape culture first. But every employee shapes it too, through their own behavior.
That’s why a company’s culture is so strongly shaped by its leaders and their leadership style. Many leaders don’t even realize how much their behavior influences everyone else’s. If the boss shows up to meetings unprepared, some employees will follow suit. If a manager decides quickly and boldly, employees may do the same. So which cultural traits actually help innovation work?
Our guiding principles for Business Design already point to some pillars of a strong innovation culture.
Dream Big, Act Small: We build innovation today by defining a big vision for tomorrow, then reverse-engineering it into digestible pieces. We call the path to the vision “strategy.”
Customers First: We build innovation for customers, so we bring them into our work at the right moments, using the right methods. Not too early, not too late.
Think Business, Not Product: The keyword here is holistic thinking. We consider every element that affects an innovation’s success.
Demo or Die: It’s easier to talk about something new once you’ve turned the idea into a prototype, a model, or a demo.
Facts Over Opinions: We decide how to shape innovation mostly on facts — not gut feel.
In addition, we also value these traits in an innovation culture:
The drive to excite others with results: Business Design needs leaders and employees who approach their work wanting to excite customers, colleagues, and partners with what they deliver. Just completing tasks without drawing negative attention might be a fine survival strategy in many companies. Business Design needs more. But watch out: wanting to excite people is not the same as perfectionism.
Momentum over perfectionism: Some companies chase perfection. They search for the perfect solution, the perfect strategy, the perfect product — and keep working in secret until they feel they’ve arrived. Business Design replaces “perfect” with “as good as possible” and tests ideas early, under real conditions. Business Design needs movement and a felt sense of progress. Sometimes in big steps, sometimes in small ones. Every day.
Decide! When a project sponsor doesn’t quickly decide what happens next after an innovation project, it wastes money, time, and the motivation of the best people. Sure, some decisions are hard to make and take courage. But it’s rare that a decision can’t be refined — or even corrected — later.
Mistakes are bad. Making no mistakes is worse. The famous “failure culture” comes up often in companies. At one extreme, people demonize mistakes. At the other, they celebrate them (do you know “fuck-up nights”?) or bring up their failure culture in every meeting. Both extremes miss the point. Mistakes are mistakes, and they’re bad at first — negative emotions about them are natural, sometimes even healthy. However, making no mistakes at all would be worse. We need a culture that balances the two extremes.
One more thing: these cultural traits matter most for people doing innovation work. Other parts of a company may need different traits. Bookkeeping, for instance, likely requires a very different culture and different employee behaviour.