1. Discuss whether “culture beats strategy”. What does it mean? Do you agree? “In my experience culture beats strategy. We have seen how this principle works in practice.” Jørn Lyseggen, one of the entrepreneurs and the CEO of Meltwater, is sitting down with us at a café in downtown San Francisco. He refers to the famous expression, possibly coming from the mouth of Professor Peter Drucker, illustrating how a great strategy is useless without an organisation capable of putting it into practice.

Meltwater News (now Meltwater Group) was started in 2001 as a media monitoring company by two Norwegian IT entrepreneurs – Jørn Lyseggen and his partner. With a conscious aim to grow without external funding, they focused on creating a cost-conscious, down-to-earth and sales-orientated culture. With the launch of Meltwater News in Norway, there were more than 10 competitors – all of which were well funded – offering online media monitoring in the market. In the beginning, they developed and grew the company through bootstrapping; strictly providing their own hours and knowledge, as well as the resources available within their networks. Lyseggen has shown an uncompromising attitude to recruitment, by seeking to only hire people (sales people and engineers) with management potential and a commercial outlook.