60-Minute CEO: Mastering Leadership an Hour at a Time

Chapter 18

Strategy and Execution

I still carry the sting of seeing the cover of a leading business magazine, which stopped me dead in my tracks as I was hustling down an airport concourse in the early 1990s. It changed my life’s work. Big black letters on a blood red background read: Strategy Didn’t Work!

Hurriedly scratching past the ads to find the lead article, I locked in on a chart that compared strategic planning expenditures with business performance to show convincingly that there was no positive correlation! All other thoughts receded.

I was dumbstruck. Because, somewhere in my consciousness, I’d known the judgment was right. And because ...