Rethink Your Stategy

At a conference in December 2024, a consultant cornered me at the coffee station.

“I help companies with strategy,” he said, handing me a sleek business card. I asked, “What exactly do you mean by ‘strategy’?”

He launched into a jargon-filled monologue:

“Synergizing core competencies… disruptive paradigm shifts…”

When I pressed—“How do you actually translate that into action?”—he hesitated:

“Well, we define objectives, align stakeholders…”

I interrupted:

“But how do you do it? Who owns the work? How do you adapt when things go sideways?”

He stared into his latte.

The silence said everything.

In boardrooms around the globe, strategy is often synonymous with sweeping visions and polished presentations. Executives and consultants spend months defining ambitious goals—what an organization should achieve—whether it’s capturing new markets, launching innovative products, or overhauling operations. Yet, for all the time invested in crafting these plans, studies consistently show that 70% of strategies fail during execution.

This disconnect reveals a troubling truth: the business world has become obsessed with defining strategy but has neglected the far harder work of delivering it. The future of strategy lies not in debating what to do but in mastering how to do it.

The Illusion: “What” Dominates Strategy

Traditional approaches to strategy prioritize clarity of objectives—a focus that often creates a false sense of progress. Consultants and leadership teams excel at articulating goals like “grow market share by 20%” or “become the sustainability leader in our industry.” These statements look compelling in PowerPoint decks, but they rarely address the messy realities of implementation.

External advisors, incentivized to deliver tangible “deliverables,” often depart after presenting their recommendations, leaving organizations with lofty aspirations but no roadmap to achieve them.

Internally, employees compound the problem by treating strategy as an exercise in pleasing stakeholders with slick visuals rather than confronting the gritty details of accountability, resource allocation, and cross-departmental collaboration.

The result? Strategy becomes a noun—a static document—rather than a verb demanding action. Defining ‘what’ is critical, but it should occupy no more than 20% of the strategic process. The remaining 80% must focus on the how: the systems, habits, and agility to turn intent into impact.

History Repeats

History is littered with examples of organizations that understood what to do but failed at how to do it. Consider Kodak, which famously invented the digital camera in 1975 but collapsed decades later. The company’s vision for digital transformation was clear, but its inability to align its culture, incentives, and operational processes with that vision led to paralysis. By contrast, many (without naming them) rise to dominance wasn’t just about visionary products; it was rooted in obsessive execution. The seamless integration of hardware, software, retail, and supply chains—an execution masterpiece—turned its strategy into reality. These cases underscore a universal lesson: a brilliant strategy is meaningless without the discipline to operationalize it.

New Defitnion of Strategy

The next era of strategy will belong to organizations that treat execution as a core competency. This starts at the top: CEOs must prioritize implementation skills when hiring and promoting leaders, valuing pragmatism over charisma. Success should be measured not by the elegance of strategic plans, but by how effectively they’re executed. A modern strategy must include three non-negotiables:

1. Translating “WHAT” into team-specific deliverables
   • Replace vague goals like “be innovative” with concrete actions: “Launch Feature X by Q3 with input from engineering, marketing, and support teams.”
2. Iterative cycles for adaptation
   • Teams must pressure-test assumptions in the plan, adapt tactics quickly (or weekly?).
3. Systems for rapid course correction
   • Build triggers to re-evaluate plans when metrics dip (e.g., customer churn rises by 5%).

Organizations in the technology field thrive not because their “what” is unique, but because they:

• Break goals into bite-sized actions,
• Debate roadblocks openly in cross-functional forums,
• Pivot faster than competitors when data demands it.

Outcomes like customer retention, employee engagement, and operational resilience emerge only when strategy is treated as a dynamic process - not a static and beautiful document.

From Vision to Victory

Strategy’s true test has always been execution. Yet too many organizations remain trapped in a cycle of planning, presenting, and underdelivering. To break free, leaders must shift their focus from defining what to mastering how—building cultures of accountability, designing agile processes, and empowering teams to act. The future belongs not to those with the boldest visions, but to those who can turn those visions into reality.