Introduction

We are in the middle of an intensive planning season. I am currently working with leaders and leadership teams on strategy development, strategic renewal, key business challenges, and goal setting. Most importantly, we are exploring how to ensure that strategies do not remain PowerPoint slides, but actually translate into execution and results.

Some leaders have the freedom to define their own strategy. Others receive strategic direction from a global headquarters and are responsible for implementing it locally.

Yet one striking pattern keeps emerging.

Almost everyone struggles with execution, and in most cases the primary reason is not the external environment.

Organizations often end up undermining their own strategies through a series of small, and sometimes not-so-small, daily decisions and behaviors.

The phenomenon reminds me of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Each character delivers a single stab wound, and together those wounds become fatal.

The same thing happens with strategy.

The consequences go far beyond missed targets and delayed execution. Along the way, organizations start losing people as well.

Certain experiences and emotions become part of everyday life:

• Chaos
• Frustration caused by constant restarts and shifting priorities
• A lack of stability and control
• The feeling that nothing ever gets completed or celebrated
• A lack of achievement and progress
• Declining motivation, creativity, and performance, while burnout and apathy continue to grow

The pattern is remarkably consistent across organizations.

That is what inspired me to put together a series on what I see as the seven recurring "deadly sins" of strategy execution, or if you prefer, the seven most common stab wounds through which organizations slowly bleed their strategies dry.

I will explore these one by one, always with a solution-focused perspective.

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list. My goal is simply to highlight the patterns I encounter most often in my work with leadership teams.

Follow the series if you would like to identify which of these patterns may be present in your own organization and quietly undermining execution. And also if you are looking for solutions, ways of doing differently. 

The first "stab wound" is coming soon.

In the meantime, I would love to hear about your own experiences.