Leadership thinking. Sector intelligence.
Practical perspectives from people who’ve been there.
Why Great Strategies Fail
Every leadership team we work with invests significant time developing strategy. Offsites. Workshops. Market analysis. Growth plans. The strategy deck is usually excellent.
Yet 12–18 months later, many organisations quietly acknowledge something uncomfortable: the strategy hasn’t translated into real change. Not because the strategy was wrong. But because execution was never designed.
This is not a niche problem. Research by Harvard Business School professor Robert Kaplan suggests that up to 90% of organisations fail to fully execute their strategies — and that only 5% of employees can articulate what their organisation’s strategy actually is. Strategy without execution is not strategy. It’s aspiration.
A Familiar Story, Closer to Home
Australia’s retail sector offers a particularly instructive example. The collapse of Myer’s Customer First Plan — a multi-year strategy launched in 2015 with bold commitments to reinvent the customer experience, invest in digital capability, and restructure the business — is widely cited as a case study in execution failure.
The strategic intent was sound. The market context was clear. The competitive pressure from international entrants and the shift to online was well understood. Yet Myer struggled to convert strategic direction into operational reality. Structural misalignment, inconsistent leadership sponsorship, and an underinvestment in the cultural and capability shifts required to underpin the transformation meant the strategy repeatedly stalled. By 2018, the company had written down the value of its brand by $515 million and was facing a shareholder revolt.
The lesson isn’t that the strategy was wrong. It’s that the organisation wasn’t built to carry it.
Why Execution Fails: Three Patterns Worth Naming
Strategy gets handed over, not embedded. In most organisations, strategy development and execution are treated as sequential activities. The strategy team develops the plan; the business is expected to implement it. What gets lost in that handover is context, conviction, and commitment. Harvard’s Kaplan and Norton, whose Balanced Scorecard work reshaped how organisations think about strategy execution, were clear on this: organisations that fail to translate strategy into operational objectives and behavioural expectations at every level will not execute, regardless of the quality of the plan.
Leadership alignment is assumed, not built. A strategy signed off in the boardroom is not the same as a strategy that leadership is genuinely aligned behind. Research from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that weak leadership alignment and insufficient senior sponsorship are among the most cited causes of strategic initiative failure. When the leadership team is not visibly, consistently, and behaviourally committed to a strategy — not just verbally — the organisation takes note. And it adjusts accordingly.
Communication is mistaken for change. Announcing a strategy and embedding it are entirely different endeavours. When organisations rely on town halls, emails, and cascaded briefings as their primary execution mechanism, they are broadcasting. They are not changing. Prosci’s change management research consistently shows that active, visible sponsorship and structured adoption planning are far stronger predictors of successful execution than communication quality alone.
What Changes When Execution Is Designed
The organisations that execute well don’t have better strategies. They have better execution infrastructure — built before the strategy goes live, not scrambled together after adoption falters.
They invest in leadership alignment as a precondition, not an assumption. They translate strategy into what it means for every layer of the organisation, not just the top. They equip middle managers to lead the change, rather than simply inform them of it. And they measure behavioural adoption, not just activity.
None of this requires a 50-page methodology. It requires deliberate design — and the recognition that implementation is a discipline, not an afterthought.
The strategy gap in most organisations is not an ideas problem. It’s an execution design problem. And that’s actually good news — because it’s solvable.