Your most valuable strategic asset

Culture is usually placed towards the end of a business strategy document (if it’s even mentioned at all!). 

Often labelled ‘Our people’, it goes into very little detail about the work required to reset, refresh or transform the way that those people work in order to achieve the goals set out towards the start of the document. And the budget required to fulfil this activity is minimal, non-existent or cut at the first opportunity.

Yet culture isn't a soft accompaniment to strategy. It's the thing that decides whether a strategy will be delivered, or not.

The evidence that backs this up has been around for years. Alex Edmans tracked Fortune's ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ and found they beat the market by 3.5% a year from 1984 to 2009 - a result since replicated across four decades.

It turns out - to the surprise of no-one who has run a successful business - that people who like where they work outperform those who don't. 

The broad definition of a strategic asset is a valuable, rare, and difficult-to-imitate resource or capability that provides an organisation with a lasting competitive advantage and is essential for achieving long-term goals.

To that end, your culture is your most valuable strategic asset and one that requires continual investment and protection.

Competitors can copy your product and undercut your price, but they can’t copy how your people treat each other or work together to do great things.