The case for execution
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s research, published in Harvard Business Review and based on more than 250 companies, argues explicitly for the execution side of this divide. Their title states the position directly: strategy execution unravels — the implication being that the strategy itself was frequently reasonable, and the gap opened in the translation from plan to daily behaviour. Their central finding, that only 9% of managers could reliably count on cross-functional colleagues to deliver, describes a coordination failure happening well downstream of the original strategic decision. On this reading, disappointing results are, more often than leadership assumes, an execution story — the plan was fine; the organisation’s ability to carry it out laterally was the weak link.
This account has a particular appeal to leadership teams, worth naming honestly: it locates the problem downstream of the people who approved the strategy, in the machinery of delivery rather than in the judgement exercised at the top. That doesn’t make it wrong — the underlying research is genuinely solid — but it’s worth being aware that an explanation locating the difficulty somewhere other than one’s own prior decisions carries a structural pull toward being believed regardless of its accuracy in any specific case.
The case for strategy
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat’s research, published in what is now MIT Sloan Management Review, complicates that picture from a different angle. Their “silent killers” of strategy implementation explicitly named unclear strategy as a primary barrier — not merely poor execution of a clear plan, but ambiguity in the plan itself, disguised as an execution failure because that’s where the breakdown becomes visible. On this account, what leadership teams label “weak execution” is frequently the downstream symptom of a strategy that was never precise enough to execute consistently in the first place. Two teams interpreting an ambiguous strategy differently will produce results that look, from a leadership review, exactly like an execution problem — divergent behaviour, missed coordination, work that doesn’t quite add up — when the actual root cause sits earlier, in how clearly the strategy itself was specified.
There’s a particular reason this account is easy to overlook: the people who wrote the strategy are rarely the ones best positioned to notice its ambiguity. A document reads as clear to its own authors precisely because they know what they meant by it — the gaps only become visible to people encountering the document without that shared context, which by definition isn’t the group most likely to be asked whether the strategy itself was clear enough. The people best positioned to answer that question accurately are often the last people consulted about it.
What it means for a leader
Both bodies of research are credible, and both were produced by examining real organisations rather than by theorising. What makes this genuinely contested, rather than simply unresolved through lack of evidence, is that the same observable symptom — coordination breaking down, results diverging from the plan — is consistent with both explanations. A leadership team looking at underperformance from the outside frequently cannot distinguish, from the symptom alone, whether they’re looking at a clear strategy poorly executed or an unclear strategy that was never specified precisely enough to execute consistently.
That’s a genuinely useful thing to sit with rather than resolve prematurely. The instinct to quickly categorise a disappointing result as “a strategy problem” or “an execution problem” may itself be doing less analytical work than it appears to, if the two are, in a meaningful share of real cases, difficult to actually separate.
There’s an organisational incentive worth naming here too. Labelling a disappointing result an “execution problem” is, in most leadership cultures, less threatening to raise than labelling it a “strategy problem” — the former implicates delivery teams, the latter implicates the people who approved the plan. That asymmetry doesn’t mean execution is blamed unfairly more often than it deserves, but it’s worth being aware of as a pull on the conversation, independent of what the evidence in a specific case actually points to.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- When a recent initiative fell short, how was it decided that the problem lay in the strategy or in its execution, and who was part of that decision?
- Could the people who delivered the work describe the strategy’s intent in terms that matched those of the people who wrote it?
- What would have to be true for the organisation to conclude that the plan itself, rather than its delivery, was the issue?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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