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I’ve been subscribed to Luis Suarez’s blog for almost a month now. I usually give a blogger a month’s trial to convince myself that they’re worth following. His job is to help educate, encourage and guide IBM employees in using social tools productively, but much of what he does is expose other peoples’ work and discoveries for his blog readers.

I’ll probably be commenting on his writing from time to time because – on a much greater scale than mine – Suarez is going about the same task – supporting better organizational use of social technologies.

The current article has an irresistible title: Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch.  I’m in complete alignment with Suarez when he says:

To me, social computing within the enterprise is about everything, but the tools. It’s a philosophical and social corporate movement, a lifestyle, a new way of connecting and interacting with people, both inside and outside of the firewall; one where the main focus is not on the technology itself, but on the people behind it.

He’s talking about the culture of organizations and how they are changing to adapt to the evolution of business, technology and culture beyond the organization. This is the Big Shift I refer to on the Context page of this site. Suarez posted his thinking about “how collaborative your corporate culture needs to be in order to embrace these social tools. ”

As he tends to do, Suarez uses his writing to lead to someone else’s article or paper or video presentation, which you may or may not find as enriching as he does. But his truth in this case is that social computing and the culture of the organization will have more impact on strategy than the other way around. So when an organization talks about putting together a social media strategy, their starting point should be a frank assessment of their culture and its compatibility with what the strategy would have them do.