Muge “Emma” Cody explains why business strategies often fail

The offsite ends on a Thursday. Two days of market analysis, a chosen strategy, a deck that survives every question in the room, and a leadership team that leaves aligned. On Friday, everyone returns to a job that has not changed at all.

Muge "Emma" Cody has watched that Friday come around more times than she can count, and it has shaped her view that a strategy's fate is rarely decided in the room. It is decided after, in the discipline of the pipeline, the follow-through on capture, and the harder work of getting systems and teams that were never built together to function as one, under pressure. Producing a sound strategy is rarely the scarce resource. Most competent teams can do that. What is scarce is the execution.

The gap that opens on approval

A strategy is not a plan a company reads. It is a claim that the company will operate differently than it does today, and the moment it is approved, a gap opens between the two. On one side sits the organization that exists, with its reporting lines, its incumbents, and its budget cycle. On the other sits the organization the strategy quietly assumes. Everything between those two points is the work. Almost none of it appears on the slide.

Closing that gap is rarer than most boards suppose. Bain & Company, which surveyed more than 400 executives and senior leaders for its Transformation & Change Survey, found that 88 percent of business transformations fall short of their original ambitions.

The number interests Cody less than what it conceals. Failure rates get quoted as though failure were an event, a moment when something went wrong. She sees an accumulation instead: a sequence of small deferrals, each defensible on the day it was made, which together return the company to exactly where it started.

Five links, and the strategy is only as real as the weakest

Between a strategy and a result runs a chain, and every link has to move.

The first is structure. A strategy assumes decisions get made a particular way, but the existing organization was built to make different ones, usually faster decisions about a business the company no longer runs. Leave the structure intact and the strategy has to travel through something engineered to resist it.

The second is talent, which Cody is careful to separate from headcount. A new direction needs people who have done the new thing. The honest question is whether the company has them, can hire them, or is privately hoping the current team will work it out. Most choose the third, and the third fails most often. Bain found the same pressure point from the other direction: talent was the strongest single predictor of whether a transformation succeeded, and companies with a track record of successful transformations were far more likely to have identified their mission-critical roles in advance. Seventy-six percent of respondents at strong performers said they understood which roles were mission-critical, against fifty-eight percent at poor performers.

The third is partnerships. Few strategies worth pursuing can be executed alone anymore, which makes choosing a partner a strategic act rather than a business development one. Who gets selected, and how the incentives are written, decides whether the relationship produces revenue or produces meetings.

The fourth is technology, the easiest link to move and, for that reason, the one that absorbs the most attention. Buying something feels like progress because it has a price, an owner, and a date it gets signed. It is also the link that accomplishes the least on its own.

The fifth is accountability, and it is the one that most often goes unwritten. Someone has to own each piece by name, with a budget attached and a deadline. Shared ownership is the polite version of no ownership. A strategy with no line stating who is answerable, and by when, is merely a position paper.

Nobody has to kill it

The chain between a strategy and a result rarely breaks because a leader made a bad call. It breaks because nobody made one.

Each link demands taking something away from somebody. A reporting line. A budget. A role that made sense three years ago. A partner relationship an executive has protected for a decade. These decisions are uncomfortable; they carry no natural deadline, and there is always a reasonable case for making them next quarter.

Meanwhile, the strategy remains officially alive. It is cited at town halls. It appears in the annual plan. Nobody has to declare it dead, because declaring it dead would also require a decision. What follows is not failure so much as a slow return to the way things already worked, conducted by people who all still believe in the plan.

Ninety days

Cody's test for whether any of it is real is deliberately short: judge the strategy not by the plan but by what changed in the first ninety days.

Did the structure change?

Did anyone arrive with the talent the company did not have?

Did anyone acquire, build, or partner for the technology the company said it needed?

Were partnerships that no longer served the direction terminated, and new ones formed where the strategy required them?

Was someone named, out loud, and held accountable to milestones and an end date?

Five times no, and what the company has is not a strategy. It is a well-articulated intention, with a deck to prove it. The strategy was never the hard part. Becoming the organization it assumed was.