CPA Dr. David Muturi (pictured) tells Sacco boards and management that no strategy survives contact with a culture it was never built to fit, and lays out what it takes to close that gap
Peter F. Drucker- widely acknowledged as the father of modern management – famously said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. This message came out strongly during the 15th annual KETSA conference; bringing together Sacco board members, chief executive officers and senior management from across the country. It was delivered by CPA Dr. David Muturi. This message unsettled as much as it inspired. Dr. Muturi’s argument was simple to state but difficult to live by: a Sacco can write the most brilliant strategy in the sub-sector, invest heavily in consultants and planning retreats, and still fail to become the integrated, one-stop financial institution its members expect, because strategy is only ever an intention.
What actually happens inside an organisation, he told the room, is decided by something far less glamorous and far harder to change: culture. “Strategy is executed by people. When people are executing the strategy, they do things in the way that they know, in the way that they believe, in the way that they have always done it — unless a deliberate effort is made to align the strategy and the culture.”
Why culture quietly defeats strategy
Dr. Muturi opened by dismantling a comfortable assumption held by many boards: that a well-written strategic plan, once approved, will more or less execute itself. Research, he noted, tells a different story. Culture has a habit of overpowering even the best-designed strategy, precisely because strategy is a document, while culture is a daily, lived pattern of behaviour. A Sacco can resolve, on paper, to become a one-stop shop offering credit, insurance, investment products and digital banking under one roof. But if the underlying culture rewards siloed thinking, discourages risk-taking, or tolerates board members who serve their own interests ahead of members’, that ambition will remain, in his words, an unfulfilled intention rather than a lived reality.
He was equally direct about where responsibility for this begins. Boards that fail to evaluate their own performance, he argued, forfeit the moral authority to evaluate anyone else. Add to this the twin dangers of micro-management, board members straying into management’s lane, and excessive “power distance” between board and staff, and the conditions for a dysfunctional culture are already in place before a single strategy document is drafted.
The Four Kinds of People in Every Sacco
To explain how culture forms or fails to form, Dr. Muturi introduced a simple but pointed framework built on two dimensions: emotional commitment and intellectual commitment. Plotted against each other, they produce four types of people found in virtually every Sacco boardroom and back office.
Those with neither emotional nor intellectual investment in the institution (he called them ‘weak wingers’ ) , but contributing little. Far more dangerous, in his assessment, are the ‘loose cannons’ – people who are emotionally attached to the Sacco movement but have never taken time to build the intellectual grounding their role demands. He described this group as unusually common within the Sacco movement itself, and cautioned that their goodwill can do real damage precisely because it is undisciplined. A third group — intellectually qualified but emotionally detached — become mere bystanders, going through the motions without conviction.W
“The champions are people who are both intellectually and emotionally committed, and that is how you create positive organisational culture — as they work together to make an organisation function.”
For Dr. Muturi, the composition of a Sacco’s leadership along these lines, and, crucially, the motives that brought board members to the table in the first place, is itself the seed of organisational culture. A board member who sought office for personal benefit, he warned, imports that orientation into the institution, and it hardens into a culture where self-interest becomes normalised.
What a Strong Culture Actually Looks Like
Dr. Muturi offered Sacco leaders a practical checklist for diagnosing their own institutions. The first marker is authentic leadership – a board and management team whose vision and purpose are visible and felt, not merely stated. Staff, he observed, can always tell the difference between a leader who is genuine and one who is performing. Because, as he repeated more than once during his address, “a fish rots from the head.”
The second marker is whether stated core values are actually lived, rather than merely displayed. He drew a domestic analogy that landed well with the audience: many families post their values on the wall, yet it is the values the household actually practises, not the ones it prints, that children absorb and repeat. Sacco culture, he argued, works exactly the same way; members and staff learn an institution’s real values by observing what is tolerated and what is not, regardless of what the strategy document says.
From there, he listed employee empowerment, open and psychologically safe communication, and a genuine commitment to staff wellbeing and recognition as the remaining pillars. On empowerment specifically, he cautioned against boards that hire professionals and then decline to let them exercise professional judgement. Employees who must constantly look over their shoulder, he said, are operating inside a weak culture, and no strategy survives that condition intact.
The payoff
Why should a Sacco board invest scarce time in something as intangible as culture? Dr. Muturi’s answer was unambiguous: because culture is what determines whether a Sacco can innovate, take calculated risks, break down silos, and adapt fast enough to stay ahead of the competition — including banks and fintechs now competing directly for the same members. An ultra-conservative culture, he warned, will always suppress innovation regardless of what the strategic plan promises, because people who fear the consequences of failure will simply avoid trying anything new. Organisations that build psychological safety into daily practice, by contrast, free their people to make independent, well-reasoned decisions without living in fear of intimidation.
A practical roadmap: ten steps to reshape culture
Perhaps the most valuable part of Dr. Muturi’s session, for an audience of practising leaders, was the structured methodology he laid out for deliberately shaping culture rather than leaving it to chance. He described roughly ten sequential steps that Sacco boards can apply:
a) Audit the current culture – ask honest, sometimes uncomfortable questions about trust, customer experience and how people actually relate to one another. Dr. Muturi noted that boards are frequently surprised by what an honest audit reveals about practices they had assumed were under control.
b) Review the seven elements against strategy – structure, systems, shared values, style, staff and skills — checking each for alignment with both the stated strategy and the lived culture, since elements can quietly drift out of alignment over time.
c) Review and clarify organisational values, rather than treating the values slide as a one-off item retired the moment the board approves the strategy.
d) Define the institution’s brand and HR vision — in effect, the one word or sentence customers and staff would use to describe the Sacco — because that description shapes both talent attraction and member trust.
e) Review the customer service charter against actual performance, not just its published promises — the classic example being a loan ‘processed within 24 hours’ that, in practice, takes weeks.
f) Hold regular leadership engagements and involve management and supervisors directly in agreeing the two or three values the institution genuinely wants to be known for, since no organisation can credibly claim to embody everything at once.
g) Communicate relentlessly and build a tracker. Values must be communicated to every stakeholder, and progress must be actively tracked, because — as Dr. Muturi put it plainly — people revert to old habits quickly without consistent follow-through.
Five Tools for Changing Minds
Even the best-designed culture programme will stall, Dr. Muturi cautioned, unless leaders understand how to actually change the way people think and behave. He grouped the available tools into three broad categories; leadership and inspiration, management and information, power and intimidation, and was blunt about their relative value.
“Intimidation will only work for a short while.”
The tools worth investing in, he said, sit within the leadership category: having and communicating a clear vision; persuasion that appeals to purpose rather than simply issuing instructions; leading by visible example, since staff and members will copy whatever behaviour the leadership actually models, good or bad; deliberate storytelling that captures both successes and failures; and genuine two-way conversation, which he distinguished sharply from leaders ‘talking down’ to staff.
To illustrate the power of storytelling, he recounted an anecdote from a Sacco he had worked with: a livestock trader who regularly brought in coin deposits was met with visible irritation by a cashier one afternoon. Offended, the customer closed his account and moved his business elsewhere. A decade later, that same customer was running a large enterprise with more than twenty trucks in distribution. The lesson Dr. Muturi drew from it; retold deliberately within the Sacco to shape how every cashier treats every customer, was that no deposit, however small, reveals the true scale of the relationship an institution stands to lose.
The leader’s homework
Dr. Muturi closed his session with a challenge addressed squarely at the board members and executives in the room: once a strategy has been formulated, the next question a leader must ask is not “is this strategy good?” but “is our culture aligned to support it?” Without that alignment, he warned, even a technically sound strategy formulated by the best consultants will sit unexecuted, while Saccos with weaker plans but stronger culture pull ahead.
“If you are doing a good thing, the culture must be aligned. It must be aligned.”
For a Sacco sub- sector under growing pressure to consolidate services, deepen member trust and compete credibly against banks and digital lenders for the one-stop-shop mandate, Dr. Muturi’s message to boardrooms was less about adding a new initiative to an already crowded strategic agenda, and more about a change in leadership posture: culture is not a soft add-on to strategy execution. It is the precondition for it.
