Strategy for Breakfast
Culture in the land of counter-culture
I was all excited when I receive an email that my flight to SFO on United would have their new Starlink high-speed internet service on it, and my first thought was: “Sure. . . I’m sure the first planes you’re going to upgrade will be the Embraer 175s flying out of St. Louis.” And guess what? The broken clock theorem held and I was right. So my 20KB/second stream is competing with the Minecraft Movie being streamed in 8B. So we’ll see if this works. So devoted am I to the journal that I am foregoing the opportunity to reconcile the online and in-person course descriptions for my vice dean. That fun will have to wait until they track me down next week in the office.
I’m fortunate to get to talk with the MORS folks at Berkeley tomorrow, which is such a fascinating mix of scholars from different trainings, fields, and methodologies. There are not many departments where you can get top scholars that range from micro to org theory to innovation strategy to sociology, decision sciences, and more. Hopefully they’ll like my weird paper which is a sort of mix of micro and macro.
Speaking of my weird paper, in trying to polish it off for submission I’ve been reminded of exactly how hard effective writing is. For those of you just starting out in your career, and wondering why it’s taking you forever to write that intro or theory section, it’s not just you. Last Sunday I spent five hours on a couple of paragraphs, and would be super speedy for a paragraph in an intro. I’ve spent days on end trying to get the first paragraph right, then had a coauthor point out that there was an entirely better direction to go. So be easy on yourself, and put in the time. And then, when in the future our robot overlords are doing the Robo-Boogie as they write 40 papers per day, you can tell stories about how much better your papers were than theirs.
Berkeley is also hosting their annual Culture Connect Conference January 13, 2026, and you can find the call for it here. It looks like a fascinating lineup of keynotes from economics, cognitive sciences, computer science, and psychology. The deadline for abstracts is October 27. It feels like a golden age for culture research, given the computational and modeling power we are developing to measure and identify such a complex and many-colored concept. The frontier of understanding culture seems to be moving rapidly. I’ve been playing around with this a bit in industry, particularly around M&A and post-merger integration (PMI). There’s so much potential to measure culture and how it defines the boundary of the firm, and ultimately to understand when exactly it eats strategy for breakfast (my money is on Tuesdays).1
In other news Chief Editorial Cat Butterburger defied recent genius and beautiful recommendations from our very scientifically sound government and got his annual vaccinations. Evidently they were bad enough to switch him over to reading biomedical papers now, which he’s proposing we start publishing. Dangerous things, those vaccines. Making cats read science.
Well, we’re down to about 2KB here over the Rockies, and the turbulence has delayed my snack box delivery. Things are desperate, so I’ll sign off now and post this when I land. Have a great week folks! Our new issue should drop shortly, so I’ll be back when that happens.
Lamar
Evidently, attributing the quote “culture eats strategy for breakfast” to Peter Drucker is apocryphal. Which is just another slide in my exec ed courses that I have to delete now.