Strategy lives on the slides but not in daily work: it’s presented in January, and by June no one mentions it anymore. Strategy is decided by what gets done on Tuesday. What matters is whether the strategy has an owner, whether it shows up in everyone’s personal targets, and whether people dare to let go of something old.
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Picture a typical strategy year. In the autumn, the management team holds two workshops. Sticky notes pile up on the wall, the vision is condensed into three sentences, and a metric is agreed for every goal.
In January, the strategy is presented at a staff briefing. The CEO speaks well and the slides are clear. In the hallway, people agree the direction makes sense. Then everyone goes back to their desk and opens their inbox.
By June, no one is talking about the strategy anymore. It wasn’t rejected. People simply never found a way to bring it into their own week.
In December, the CFO looks at the numbers. Some targets were missed. The management team starts planning a new round.
I’ve seen this from both sides of the table. As a CEO, I built strategy myself; today I lead strategy work with our clients. The cause is rarely a bad strategy. More often, strategy and its implementation, bringing it into daily work, have been treated as two separate things. I first wrote about the forgotten strategy back in the spring (The Strategy No One Remembers).
If a strategy doesn’t guide what you do this week, it’s still just a good plan.
At the end, you’ll find a playbook template and a checklist for the management team.
McKinsey’s 2021 survey had 1,034 respondents. Of the value lost in change initiatives, 55 percent disappeared only during or after execution. Even initiatives rated as successful captured just 67 percent of their full potential value. Source: McKinsey & Company: Losing from Day One, 2021.
So the biggest opportunity lies in the stage that’s rarely planned as carefully as the plan itself: daily work after the decision is made.
My own observation points the same way. When we review our clients’ strategies with them, the high-level goals are often so generic that they could fit any company. That makes them hard to put into practice.
That’s why the first test is simple. The whole strategy has to fit on one slide.
I use this test often. A spouse isn’t expected to have strategic expertise. The test measures whether the strategy is written clearly enough that an outsider can understand it from a single page. If they understand it, so will a new salesperson, a technician, and a customer service employee.
Only what’s truly important fits on one page. That’s exactly why writing that page is so hard.
When strategy fails to move forward, in our projects the cause has usually come down to one of these.
One: too many pillars. Even a small company often has several pillars it tries to strengthen at once. Growth is pursued across too broad a front, and nothing gets the focus it needs. A good strategy picks a few things and states clearly what will be left out.
Two: the strategy is written for leadership. “We will strengthen our competitiveness within an integrated value chain.” The person answering the customer service phone reads that sentence and wonders what it means for their job. A good strategy uses words already in use within the company. It spells out what the goal means for sales, for customer relationships, for the team, and for one person’s week.
Three: strategic initiatives are run as a separate entity. They are placed in their own silo and run in the background. This creates two task lists in the organization: strategy and real work. Real work wins most weeks. Initiatives should be integrated into the same weekly activities and prioritized differently there. Then, there is no separate strategy and separate operational work.
The same is visible in the management team. Strategy is often discussed in its own meeting, while the weekly meeting covers other matters. Initiatives also relate directly or indirectly to the customer: how to provide more value to the customer or how to engage them. I will share more about the management team’s work in the article The same item is on the management team’s agenda for the third time.
Clarity alone isn’t enough. In strategy workshops, I also run a second test. I swap the company’s name on the strategy slide for a competitor’s name and ask: could this be their strategy? The first time, the answer is often yes. That means the page still doesn’t say what makes this particular company different.
The answer is worth seeking from customers. Leadership has a strong vision, experience, and history, but in the end, strategy is made for customers. That’s why our strategy work starts with listening on three levels: first leadership, then the people who work with customers, and only then the customers themselves. Once the slide contains customers’ own words, a competitor’s name no longer fits as well.
For more on how customers are brought into strategy, see the article The Strategy That Guesses at Its Customer.
Direction starts with the owners and the board. The owners’ strategy or the board’s vision needs to be clear over the long term so leadership can build a strategy on it. In many companies, it’s precisely the vision that’s unclear, leaving the strategy as a guessing game about what the owners actually want. Before the first workshop, it’s worth asking the board for a one-page answer: where do the owners want the company to be in three years, and what are they willing to give up? The same page later gives the board a way to track whether the strategy is progressing.
Once the direction is clear, bringing it into daily work rests on three things: an owner, personal targets, and the courage to stop doing something.
An owner whose calendar reflects the strategy. The CEO’s sign-off once a year sets the direction. In daily work, you also need someone who asks every Monday: what did we do for the strategy last week, and what will we do this week? Without an owner, the strategy just waits its turn.
Personal targets that reflect the strategy. Strategy drives the company’s goals, which drive team goals, which drive each person’s own targets. I’ve seen leaders operating on three separate tracks: their own numbers, their own team, and the strategy. When these conflict, the first two usually win if the strategy isn’t reflected in personal targets. One strategic result in a leader’s own target brings the strategy into their week. If, for example, the strategy focuses growth on existing customers, the sales team’s target might read: we’ve discussed next year’s plans at decision-maker level with our most important customers. The structure is simple: one big goal for the company, team goals derived from it, and personal targets derived from those. Each level gets a timeline, an accountable person, and no more than three concrete actions.
The courage to stop. Strategy means making choices. A choice means something is left undone. Often something new is added alongside the old without removing the old, so the calendar fills up and the new initiative never gets room. A good gauge of how seriously a strategy is taken is the list of things being stopped.
Commitment comes most easily when people help shape the direction themselves. Trimedia built its strategy work so that the whole staff was involved, not just leadership. Arto Saksola described the benefit this way:
One of the biggest benefits of the collaboration was that the entire staff was brought into the process. This wasn’t just a leadership project, everyone got to take part and have a say. That built commitment and made it easier to put the changes into practice.
Arto Saksola, Trimedia
Our collaboration with Trimedia has continued through new rounds of strategy work. Read the full story: Trimedia sharpened its direction and got the whole team on board.
Many of our clients set a three-year goal: in three years, we’ll be the market leader in certain product categories. Few break that down. If we want to be somewhere in three years, the first year needs to bring certain things to a certain stage. Only then can the second year progress at a pace that puts the third-year growth target within reach.
That’s why we use a model where the three-year goal is broken into year-long steps. Precise targets are set one year at a time. Each year, we refine what the next step requires. At the same time, direction is adjusted.
Within the year, the rhythm is tighter. Quarterly, the management team reviews what’s been learned and which assumptions need updating. Weekly, strategic initiatives sit on the same list as everything else.
A slide deck tells you where you’re headed. A playbook also tells you how you’ll play when the market goes quiet or a competitor cuts prices. That’s why it stays open every week and gets a bit worn at the edges.
Many people first ask which model they should adopt. The model isn’t the solution. What matters is what actually works in your company and what people pick up most easily. A simple template used every week beats an elegant model that’s reviewed once a year.
A good playbook has five parts.
Playbook template
All five parts fit on ten pages. If the playbook grows to fifty pages, it’s turning back into a slide deck.
Once the playbook is finished, one slide is made for the staff from it. I learned this at large international companies: a strategy has to be presentable on a single page even to people who weren’t involved in creating it.
Checklist for the management team and the board
Let’s go back to the strategy year. If the strategy was presented in January, no new round is needed. It’s enough to check in on it before it’s forgotten. In practice, three answers are brought to the next management team meeting. Before the meeting, management team members ask the same question to three people from different parts of the company: a supervisor, a specialist, and someone who works with customers every day. The question is:
The question isn’t explained, and no help is given with the answer. Responses are recorded word for word and brought to the meeting.
Similar answers show that the strategy is alive. Different answers show it exists on paper but doesn’t yet guide daily work. When two answers match and a third doesn’t, leadership often assumes the message got through, even though part of the company is pulling in a different direction.
The answers show exactly where the strategy’s journey stands right now. Gaps can be fixed before they show up in the numbers.
That’s how people are still talking about the strategy in June.
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A few sentences in your own words is enough. We will respond within one business day and tell you directly if we can help and where we would start.
