Adapt to Win

Chapter 2Strategy Realization and Its Three Critical Subprocesses

When thinking about strategy and how strategy-related capabilities (or lack thereof) can contribute to competitors winning or losing in a market, I often recall a conversation with a long-ago boss, the CEO of a then early-stage software company. I was head of a professional services and consulting P&L at the time, and our leadership team was struggling to get aligned on our strategic objectives and struggling to focus on quarterly goals. We experimented with various strategy frameworks trying to find a process and techniques that would get everyone in the company focused on and executing the strategy effectively.

One day, my boss asked: “Evan, do you think it’s more important for a company to do a great job developing their strategy, or is it more important that the company excel in executing its strategy effectively?”

My answer at the time was fairly uninformed, and to challenge him a bit, I provided the answer I knew he didn’t want to hear: “Developing a great strategy is most important,” I said.

This role was my third in an early-stage technology company, and I still felt singed by the fiery implosions of a couple of previous firms, their failures due in no small part, to us building the wrong products for the wrong markets. Perhaps I was suffering some recency bias having been burned by poor strategy definition in previous roles. I was also quite naïve about corporate strategy methodology at the time. (I ...