Science defines culture as “the cultivation of bacteria, tissue cells, etc., in an artificial medium containing nutrients.”   The same principle applies to business.  Culture is the cultivation of the human beliefs swirling and growing in the petri dish labeled: your organization. Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In the light of the recent General Motors debacle we might want to amend Drucker’s wisdom to, “Culture eats safety for breakfast.” People’s beliefs about what’s important to leadership will always trump any actual goals the leader puts forth. When you were a kid, if your mom said, “We’re going to clean up this house from top to bottom, you knew whether you were in for a week of scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush or the effort would be abandoned by lunch.  In the case of my mom, proclamations made during the family meetings were serious business, but any instructions given after 5 p.m. when she had a glass of wine in her hand, could safely be ignored. We didn’t write down the rules in a kid codebook; we just knew from years of intuitively figuring out “how things work” in our house.  It didn’t matter what my mother said, we knew, after 5 p.m. her real goal was relaxation. In business, unspoken beliefs about the leader’s “real goals” can create a culture where it is entirely possible for the leader to direct people to do one thing, and have their team respond by doing the exact opposite. For example, if you tell employees that safety is your top priority, yet they know that hitting the earnings target is what really matters, they will do everything they can to protect the earnings, and ensure bonuses, even http://www.mcleodandmore.com/2014/07/29/why-the-gm-dont-blame-me-problem-really-happened/