The role of the board in corporate culture

THE American management guru Peter Drucker is believed to have said that "culture eats strategy for breakfast". By this, he meant that strategies, even the most well developed, can be resisted, and execution can fail, in the face of an unsupportive culture.

And yet, even though strategy is (quite rightly) analysed in depth alongside corporate governance, culture is rarely the subject of much consideration at the board level. This, despite the consensus about its importance to sustainable success. If anything, any question or debate about culture tends to be squeezed off the agenda.

Against this context, we need to ask: What role does the board have in relation to the culture of the company?