CEO's column August 2026

Everyone says that culture is crucial. Fewer dare to ask the question why culture looks the way it does. Maybe it is not a result of our values, but of our everyday decisions. And then the question suddenly becomes much more uncomfortable.

In his latest column, Mikael Nylund reflects on why corporate culture is often misunderstood. Most companies know their values by heart. Courage, collaboration, customer focus and responsibility are on walls, intranets and PowerPoint slides. Yet the same problems arise over and over again. People keep quiet, departments build silos and the customer ends up further down the priority list. Perhaps this is because corporate culture is not shaped by what we say, but by what is rational for people to do.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. But who eats culture?

There is an almost impressive consensus in Swedish business about what characterizes a good corporate culture.

We should be brave, customer-oriented, curious and responsible. We should collaborate, think new things and be happy to challenge old truths. If you Google the values of Swedish companies long enough, you begin to suspect that a significant part of the business community has hired the same copywriter.

Yet corporate cultures are obviously very different. It's strange. Or maybe not.

Peter Drucker is credited with the famous phrase that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It has been repeated so many times in management conferences and boardrooms that even the phrase itself should start to feel satiated. But if culture is so crucial, a much more interesting question remains:

What does culture eat for breakfast?

Probably our behaviors.

The wall says one thing. Everyday life says another.

Most companies today have a strategy. Many have also defined the culture and behaviors that will help them implement it. The problem arises somewhere between the PowerPoint and Monday morning.

We say customer first , but let salespeople spend a large part of their week on internal meetings, reporting and administration. We say take responsibility , but build organisations where decisions need to be anchored so many times that the responsible employee ultimately does the most rational thing: wait. We say dare to challenge , but those who question an established truth sometimes discover that courage is appreciated much more in the values than in the conference room. We say collaboration , but construct goals, budgets and incentives that make it rational to optimise one's own part. Then we conduct an employee survey and are surprised by the results. Perhaps we shouldn't be. People are quite adept at understanding what really matters. They hear what management says, but study what management does: what is rewarded, who is promoted, which results are recognised and which behaviours are allowed to pass.

The latter tends to win.

Culture is only expensive when it means something

It's easy to talk about culture when everything is going well.

Saying that the customer comes first is easy until the customer's best interests clash with your own budget. Saying that we want courageous employees is easy until someone challenges the manager's decision. Saying that people are our most important asset is easy until the results give way and the Excel sheet is opened. That's when values stop being words and start costing something. And maybe it's only then that we learn what values the organization actually has.

Culture is not built primarily on the kickoff. It is built when the boss lets a high-performing employee misbehave because the person “delivers their numbers,” when someone makes a costly mistake and discovers whether the organization’s talk about learning still applies, or when two departments come into conflict and see if management rewards the one who defends their turf or the one who solves the customer’s problem. It is the small decisions that rarely end up in the annual report, but that everyone in the organization notices.

Rational behavior wins.

That's why I think we sometimes ask the wrong question when discussing culture.

We ask:

How do we get people to live our values?

Maybe we should ask instead:

What behaviors have we as leaders made rational?

If employees are silent, the problem may not be a lack of courage. The organization may have taught them that speaking their minds costs more than they feel. If people work in silos, the problem may not be a lack of collaboration. Goals, mandates, and reward systems may have made silos the rational choice. And if salespeople don’t put the customer first, the problem may not be their customer focus. It may be that we have filled our calendars with everything else and then put up a poster about customer orientation. People adapt to the system they are in. What is repeated becomes behavior, behaviors that survive become norms – and norms eventually get a nicer name.

Corporate culture.

Culture is the receipt

Perhaps we should stop seeing corporate culture as something management has and instead consider it a receipt for how management actually leads. There is an easy way to test this. Remove the values. Put away the culture presentation, the employee handbook and the pictures from the last kickoff and study the last six months instead.

Which people have received the most appreciation? Which behaviors have been rewarded? What have managers accepted even though everyone knows it's not really okay? How are decisions made when things get difficult? What is prioritized when there's not enough time? What happens to those who disagree? And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all:

If our employees were to describe our values solely based on our actions – what words would they choose?

Somewhere in there is probably the company's real culture. The management can decide the strategy. It can formulate the values. But the culture has the peculiarity that it doesn't care much about what's in the PowerPoint. It observes what we do, what we reward and what we accept and adapts accordingly.

So the next time someone notes that culture eats strategy for breakfast, perhaps there is a more important question to ask:

What have we served ourselves?

Mikael Nylund, CEO, Mindit – the House of Sales & Leadership