Culture Club

—What's gone bad in the morning won't come good in the evening!

[Jamaican proverb]

("Wa gawn bad in the morning, nah come good inna de evening") in colloquial terms.

In mathematics, an initial condition, in some contexts called a seed value, is a value of an evolving variable at some point in time designated as the initial time. [wiki]

Now, clearly, my mum had no reference to scientific journals or Wikipedia back then. She was just conveying an old-time saying that she had lived by and believed to be correct.

Without religious reference, the concept of tablets of behaviours and expectation was doctrine in ours and many other like-minded households.

At the core of this tablet is the view that you should focus on the root causes, not the symptoms. The morning, rather than the evening!

To see how this plays out in the broader corporate world, we need to look no further than Facebook.

Their early rallying call was "move fast and break things." And we know how that ended! 

Of course, the company motto has sobered somewhat post-IPO, but the change was made harder by the initial conditions. 

In most companies, a proxy for the initial conditions is culture.

Like Facebook, a culture pivot is possible–but such change is challenging and typically requires a shattering of the current visage to its core.

Initial conditions shape future outcomes!

CULTURE EATS STRATEGY FOR BREAKFAST!

–Peter Drucker