Hi there! My name is Marcus Collins, DBA, and I study culture and its influence and impact on human behavior at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Each week, this column will explore the inner workings of organizational culture and the mechanisms that make it tick. Every entry will be accompanied by an episode from my podcast, From the Culture, that digs deeper into the culture of work from my conversations with the organizational leaders that make it all happen. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you are not having. Sign up for the newsletter to make sure you don’t miss a beat.

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Culture eats strategy for breakfast. We’ve all heard this misattributed Peter Drucker quote and instinctively understand the disproportionate influence culture can have on an organization’s business. However, if you asked five people to define organizational culture, you’d likely get 55 different answers.

Chief among them would be something along the lines of “organizational culture is how we do things around here,” the behaviors and norms that make up how a company engages in the collective production of work.

Sounds about right, right? Sure. However, a century’s worth of literature on the matter would say otherwise.

According to Émile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, culture is a system of conventions and........

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