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Businesses can fail even if they have a good strategy because they don’t have the right corporate culture.

That’s the argument put forward by Sue Kernahan, general manager of Peterborough-based medical devices company Coloplast, as this month’s guest writer on the blog of marketing communications company Metrix Marketing (www.metrixmarketing.co.uk).

“Having a clear business strategy is vital for business success. If you don’t know where you’re going, and how you’re going to get there, you’re very unlikely to arrive at your business destination,” writes Sue.

However, having and implementing a strategy is no guarantee of success. Many things can derail even the best of strategies and one of the most significant of those potential pitfalls is corporate culture.

Conversely, says Sue, a strong and supportive corporate culture can compensate for a poor strategy, delivering success despite strategic failures.

In fact, she says, culture is by far the most important determinant of success, concluding that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

In her blog post she points out that this topic has come to prominence in recent weeks as one of the nation’s largest organisations – the NHS – has been taking a look at its own corporate culture and coming to the view that some things need to change. She welcomes the NHS taking a ‘customer-centric’ approach based on values such as care and compassion.

The full article can be read at: http://bit.ly/TFqL8Z