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# Leaders are responsible for culture and strategy. Everything else is secondary.
- URL: https://werd.io/leaders-are-responsible-for-culture-and-strategy-everything-else-is-secondary/
- Published: 2026-11-12T06:16:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-12T06:16:56.000Z
- Description: Are you focused on serving a need or building a product? The difference matters more than you think.
- Author: Ben Werdmuller
- Tags: Business, Notable links

Link: [*The Two Rails of Leadership, by Corey Ford in Point C*](https://pointc.co/the-two-rails-of-leadership/)

I’ve been thinking a lot about my entrepreneurship journey lately — and how I can draw lessons from it to help journalism — and this piece from [Corey Ford](https://pointc.co) landed at the right time.

> “Culture and strategy are the two things a leader is responsible for designing; everything else is delegable. \[…\] Your job as a leader isn't to come up with the next big thing. It's to build the culture, the people, and the process that can continually do this: a team whose velocity of learning outruns the pace of change. That capability lives on the culture rail. The strategy is what it produces.”

I basically punched the air.

The thing is, so many of us have got into the trap of either managing the incremental changes that we feel are needed to keep the lights on, or defining ourselves by the product we create rather than who we create it for. In doing so, we build inward-looking cultures that put us in danger of losing touch with the world we’re trying to serve.

Corey’s example of the newspaper is apt: do you produce words on a page, or do you serve a specific need for context and understanding? Only one of those answers will survive change. Someone asked me recently what I thought the business model for news should be, and I responded that *it’s the wrong question to start with*. The question is: how can we be most valuable to the people we’re trying to serve?

I’m constantly referencing [Gina Chua](https://restructurednews.substack.com/), who points out that we should care more about saving what journalism does for us than the specific institutions that produce it today. A culture centered on providing the *effects* of journalism will stand the test of time; one centered on institutionalism will not.

Can existing media institutions recenter themselves around solving needs rather than finding ways to optimize the same products, workflows, and ideas? I don’t know the answer; it’s certainly not a given. But I do know that it starts with building the right culture. And if those institutions *can’t* adapt their cultures — well, we’ll just need to build new institutions.