How to Turn Your Strategy into Daily Action
Don’t let your strategy die on the way from the boardroom to the frontline
What do an amateur orchestra rehearsal and strategy have in common?
Everything goes off-plan: the violins are arguing with the drums, someone is missing a chair, and the conductor is just waving at thin air.
In an amateur orchestra, discipline can cure the chaos. In strategy, over-planning makes you as flexible as a Swiss bank’s security protocol.
Every day, thousands of CEOs ask themselves: Is strategy a high-level set of choices or a detailed plan? They are caught in a ‘strategy-execution gap.’
There are three popular ways to bridge the gap—and a fourth one that actually works.
Inside the Club today:
1. Most projects fail
2. Thorough planning doesn’t save a project from hitting the wall
3. No one knows your strategy
4. Ditch strategic planning. Well, almost
5. CEO Uncomfortable Questions
199 out of 200 projects always fail
We are superior planners and inferior doers.
In his book How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flyvbjerg shares some shocking figures. His team analyzed 16,000 projects, from aerospace and national digitization to simple home renovations. Large-scale or small-fry, public or private—they cataloged it all.
Flyvbjerg’s statistic is thought-provoking – at the very least.
Only 47,9% of projects hit the mark on cost
Only 8.5 percent of projects hit the mark on both cost and time
And just 0.5% nail cost, time, and benefits
Only one out of 200 projects goes exactly as planned. After reading that, I thought I wasn’t as much of a loser as my recent house renovation made me feel.
Many projects Flyvbjerg studied were well-planned, thought-through tasks—and yet, they failed anyway. Clearly, thorough planning doesn’t save a project from hitting the wall.
It seems the only thing detailed planning actually increases is the planners’ overconfidence.
Some CEOs believe that meticulous breaking down their strategic goals into ‘atomic’ tasks and projects would increase the executability of their strategy. Fifteen years ago, when I was a CEO myself, I believed that, too.
Unfortunately, this approach fails flat.
Before long, updating the strategy ends up sucking more energy out of your team than actually executing it.
The Planning Paradox: The more time you spend on detailed planning, the more time you’ll spend just keeping the plan updated.
But the opposite approach is just as broken.
No One Knows Your Strategy
Imagine showing up at the theater to watch King Lear, only to discover the actors don’t know their lines and just do what they feel right to do. Unless you’re a big fan of the Theatre of the Absurd, you probably won’t enjoy the show.
But this is exactly what happens in many companies—and yours may be no exception.
In 2018, MIT Sloan Management Review published a paper that confirmed what I often see during my initial audits as a strategy advisor or consultant. The title speaks for itself: No One Knows Your Strategy — Not Even Your Top Leaders.
Quote:
“Most organizations fall far short when it comes to strategic alignment: Our analysis of 124 organizations revealed that only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company’s strategic priorities.”
Many CEOs believe that a strategy is an intention, ‘a set of choices’, or an overarching concept. Some go as far as fluffy ‘one-page strategies.’
From my 25-year experience in strategy and management, it is as effective as inspiring slogans on corporate notepads.
Your middle managers don’t do strategy every day. They are busy handling their day-to-day tasks.
If you just tell them that ‘we aim for market leadership by focusing on customer-centricity, operational efficiency, and advanced technologies,‘ they forget about this ‘strategy’ before they even leave your office.
Treating strategy as a ‘set of choices’ is like inviting your co-workers to a party at your place and giving them only the country as the address.
Many CEOs rely on a workaround—a messy hybrid of both approaches. But combining two bad ideas rarely results in a good one.
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The workaround
Some CEOs try to sort tasks into ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ buckets. They believe answering ‘what to do’ is strategy, while ‘how to do it’ is just tactics.
But imagine if Elon Musk bought Tesla and simply announced a strategy to ‘build electric cars,’ dismissing everything else as ‘tactical’ details for middle managers.
There is a far better way.
Ditch strategic planning. Well, almost.
Thinking that executives should develop strategy once a year and spend the rest of the time just executing it is like believing a writer should think one day per year and spend the other 364 days just writing.
Planning is invaluable, but it carries two dangerous side effects:
It paints a vivid, crisp, and wrong picture of the future—because all pictures of the future are wrong by definition. But the more detailed the plan, the more vivid the picture, and the more we ignore the fact that reality always has other plans.
Planning means making most of the decisions before the action even begins. Since our lazy brain dislikes making decisions, we assume they are all made once planning ends. When start acting and reality hits, instead of updating our choices, we simply bend reality to fit the plan.
Why do you even need planning in the first place?
Planning is just a way to coordinate your departments. Sales must sync with procurement, production with marketing, and HR and Finance with everyone else.
But planning isn’t the only way to synchronize—and it’s far from the best.
In the No Strategy Approach and the linked Customer-Axis Framework, we take a different path:
1. We only plan what we absolutely must. For instance, if you’re building a new factory, you clearly need a construction plan. If the success of a task depends more on us than on the external environment, it can—and should—be planned.
2. We never create a single “master plan”—not for the quarter, the year, or the next three. Instead, we plan specific tasks for whatever timeframe actually makes sense for them. Building a factory might take 12 months, while shipping a new product version takes three. These stay as two separate plans.
But in most cases, we don’t build plans; we write Navigational Principles.
We don’t make most of our decisions “before the action even begins.” We know that no matter how carefully we plan, mid-level managers will still have to make dozens of decisions every single day.
Instead of a rigid script, we give them Navigational Principles—a compass to help them recognize a right decision from a wrong one on the fly.
Just a reminder: the Customer-Axis Framework means we wrap our business around the Big Customer Problem and the Unique Customer Value tied to it. We set our goal as a direction and use Navigational Principles to guide the team toward it.
Navigational Principles are a set of decision-making rules. They show your team which choices will actually create customer value—and which ones are just noise.
For instance:
If our Unique Customer Value (UCV) is top-tier service, we expect HR to prioritize recruiting empathetic employees and developing the necessary skills among the staff.
If our UCV is a low price, we expect the IT department to provide solutions that reduce costs through automation. We will signal to all other departments that any decision aimed at reducing costs is welcome.
If our UCV is high product quality, we expect production to be guided by high quality—not low price—when selecting equipment and raw materials.
If we focus on high delivery speed, any decisions in logistics, HR, finance, IT, and marketing aimed at this goal will be directed toward creating this specific value.
The purpose of Navigational Principles is to give leaders at different levels more freedom in decision-making and coordination without relying on 'rigid' plans—where it makes sense to do so. These Principles provide the direction needed to stay on the strategic course.
Navigational Principles are simple but not easy.
A medium-sized company needs at least 40-60 navigational principles to execute its strategy. It’s not a one-off exercise. You’ll need o refine and add to them as you go.
But these principles help you kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, your middle managers can work autonomously. On the other, you know they have a solid framework to make the right decisions.
Last week, paid subscribers and founding members received an extra email with Feedback Loop case studies. This week, they’re getting examples of Navigational Principles. It’s a core principle of the Club: I share ideas with all members, but paid subscribers and founding members get the deepest insights.
I only work with a handful of companies each year to build their Navigational Principles and map their workflows. My schedule allows for one new project starting in April. If you’re ready to stop trying to cure chaos with the rigid discipline of an amateur orchestra—and give your team a different playbook instead—reply to this email to see if we’re a fit.
Conclusion
Building a five-year detailed strategic plan is like planning your daughter’s wedding when she’s three.
When a middle manager doesn’t know what decision to make, they have two options: call the boss or make the decision they think is right.
If you want to avoid unpleasant surprises, give them Navigational Principles that empower them to make the right move without your intervention.
Next Tuesday, we’ll discuss why thinking strategically is even more vital in a crisis than in predictable times. Stay tunes!
CEO uncomfortable questions
1. How do you turn your strategic ambitions into concrete actions?
2. What percentage of your strategic initiatives actually fail?
3. How could Navigational Principles assist you in this process?
4. Which Navigational Principles would you consider starting with first?
I agree with the principle and have been doing with my teams for years, it works wonders and motivate people like nothing else.
That said, how does this approach relate to Roger Martin‘s Strategic Choice Chartering principle (i.e. CEO makes top-level choices and how to handle the implied trade-offs, hands each choice to one executive who makes his own choices and trade-offs to make the top-level one work - and so it goes until the end of the chain)?
They seem very similar, but maybe I’m missing something.