Most of us have heard, and many of us have repeated, the line often credited to Peter Drucker: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. It’s provocatively catchy. Experience tells me it’s also profoundly true.
At Lumen, that quote isn’t just something we reference in a leadership offsite. It’s literally on the walls in our break rooms. And every time I walk past it, I’m reminded that you can have the smartest strategy in the world, but if your team doesn’t believe, doesn’t trust, and doesn’t move together, the strategy never leaves the slide.
In fact, I’m not sure the statement goes far enough. Today, culture is strategy.
That’s certainly how we think about our journey to transform Lumen. Over the past few months, we’ve shared lessons from that journey — how we’ve worked to turn a sleepy telecom company with substantial debt into a leading digital networking services company that’s providing critical next-gen infrastructure for the AI economy. I’ve discussed the need to have a growth mindset — learning to pivot from trying to “be right” over to “getting it right.” And in this blog, we’ve also talked about the importance of focus, of having the confidence to call our shot and go all-in.
But the underpinning of all of it, and the essence for any great company, is this: Start with the team, and end with culture.
Build The Playbook
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in leading large organizations through complex change is that when transformation fails, it’s often because leaders underestimate how deeply change is experienced by employees. And by customers, for that matter.
When I stepped into the CEO role at Lumen three years ago, the company’s financial performance was easy to spot for anyone watching CNBC. It was certainly top of mind when people asked me why I ever considered taking the job in the first place. Far less visible, yet far more consequential, was the impact of those conditions on the team.
Like other legacy telecom companies, we had been living under years of pressure, harboring a fear of innovating, grappling with uncertainty, and trying to tune out external noise. We were overly focused on trying to protect the past by slowing revenue decline. Instead of playing to win, people were playing not to lose.
To be clear, this was never about a lack of talent or effort. It was about what happens when capable people operate for too long in an environment where the safest move feels like no move at all. That might keep the lights on for a while, but it doesn’t create change. And it certainly doesn’t create momentum.
You simply cannot transform a company that’s afraid to move.
That’s why I believe it’s a mistake — one I see leaders make all the time — to treat transformation as a program. Upgrade the network. Modernize the systems. Reset the balance sheet. Yes, those things matter greatly. But they’re only one part of transformation — and rarely the most difficult. The most challenging part, and what makes change stick, is helping your people shift how they think, how they work together, how they support each other, and how they show up when the path forward isn’t so obvious.
What’s interesting is that this view isn’t always popular. Wall Street doesn’t exactly want to hear, “Great news — we’re teaching empathy today.” Especially not when you’re carrying a heavy debt load and the questions are urgent and existential. So yes, you talk about the financials and the operational punch list, and then you deliver a one-to-one say:do ratio.
But you also know, quietly and with absolute certainty, that you won’t get through that punch list unless the culture beneath changes. Because transformation isn’t executed by spreadsheets. It’s executed by people — and how they respond when the plan gets punched in the mouth.
Inspire The Players
From the beginning, we made a deliberate choice to focus on culture not as a side project, but as our core work.
For leaders, that started with honesty, sometimes brutal, about where we were and what we didn’t yet know or understand. It meant saying the quiet part out loud about our challenges and then inviting our people into the work of solving them.
I remember one moment early on that crystallized this for me. We were in a meeting with leaders, working through the realities of what we were facing, and someone called out from the back of the room: “Be honest with us, Kate … about everything.”
It was a moment of reckoning for me. I’d assumed they understood how dire our situation was, but they didn’t. So from that moment on, my leadership team and I committed to clarity and transparency. We would tell them everything (as long as it was legal and compliant).
Within hours, we prepared a clear walk-through of what we knew: the debt, the constraints, the risks — the truth about our existential threat. The next morning, we got up in front of the team and walked through it, page by page. And what struck me most was the reaction: It was as if many people were hearing this for the first time, even though they worked at the company.
That’s when it clicked. When you don’t fill the space with truth, the space fills with fear. But when you’re clear and transparent with people, you don’t weaken them — you prepare them. Transparency builds trust. Trust enables courage. And courage is what allows teams to move together when disruption feels like a battlefield.
Real transformation is never fast, and it’s rarely linear. It’s not just about the plan. It’s about whether leaders recognize that people are the unlock. They determine whether change endures or erodes.
And culture isn’t an order or a directive. It is the work. Culture is strategy.
Kate Johnson WG94 is the CEO of Fortune 500 company Lumen Technologies. A recognized thought leader on digital transformation, she was named to the 2025 Forbes “50 Over 50” list and recently was featured on Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast and at Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Summit. Prior to Lumen, she held executive roles at Microsoft, GE, and Oracle. She currently lives in Seattle with her family.
