I Blamed Execution. The Truth is Much Harder.

This is part 1 of a 6 series post on execution

I often tell people that strategy is the what and execution is the how. And while that distinction is useful, if I’m honest, I’ve inadvertently used it as a shield more than a framework.

When things don’t work, it gives me a safe place to put the failure. Execution becomes about other people’s performance instead of my choices — or the lack thereof — as the person who designed the strategic bet.

I’m not alone.

Most executives do the same. Some even take it further and outsource strategy entirely to firms like McKinsey or Bain. In that model, you can’t really be blamed for either strategy or execution. The plan came from somewhere else. The delivery failed somewhere else. It’s the safest place to stand in an organization: adjacent to responsibility, but never fully inside it.

Separating strategy from execution also lets me delay commitment. When I’m unsure, I can stay abstract. I can keep things open-ended and call it flexibility. Not choosing preserves optionality, which is, well, safe. But strategy and execution aren’t about keeping doors open; they’re about closing some of them by design.

I started thinking more deeply about why execution fails, and the answer kept pointing back — at least in part — to strategy itself. If the strategy says we’re going to build the best fintech mobile app, but the team doesn’t have mobile skills — and the strategy doesn’t dictate investments in building them because “that’s not part of the strategy, that’s the how” — then execution predictably falls apart. We’ll call it an execution failure, but whose failure is it really?

But this post isn’t about convincing you that strategy and execution are distinctions without a difference. You can decide for yourself whether the resolution to these issues lives in strategy, execution, or somewhere in between.

What I care about is getting to the root causes of execution failure. When I looked closely enough, the failures stopped being abstract and started lining up into a familiar set of causes:

1. They never truly believed in the strategy. People nodded, but they didn’t commit. Agreement was polite and lacked conviction.
2. Incentives, rewards, and mechanisms reinforced behaviors that conflicted with the strategy.
    Over time, people learned which behaviors led to praise, safety, and advancement — and adjusted, even when those behaviors undermined the strategy.
3. They hadn’t developed the skills the strategy required. Both hard skills and soft ones were assumed, not built.
4. We had the wrong people for the strategic choices we made. Or the strategy changed, and the team didn’t.
5. We measured execution poorly — or not at all. Activity looked healthy. Impact was invisible.

Execution didn’t fail because people didn’t try hard enough. It failed because the system made failure the most rational outcome. Execution doesn’t fail everywhere at once. It fails in these places, over and over again.

Once I saw that, I stopped asking, “Why can’t we execute?” and started asking a more honest question:

Which of these is actually happening here — and what part of it is mine to own?

This is part 1 of a 6 part series on execution

1. I Blamed Execution. The Truth is Much Harder.
2. They never truly believed in the strategy.
3. Incentives, rewards, and mechanisms reinforced behaviors that conflicted with the strategy.
4. We hadn’t developed the skills the strategy required.
5. We had the wrong people for the strategic choices we made.
6. We measured execution poorly — or not at all.