What is the cost of a strategy that still looks impressive in board papers, but quietly allows weak performance, slow decisions, resource abuse, duplicated work, and a laid-back culture to survive inside the organisation?
During a leadership training session, I asked: “Where is your strategy failing in real life?” The room falls quiet, and people look at their notebooks. Some smile carefully, while others glance at the CEO, as if permission is required to speak the truth. Then one staff member raises his hand and says, “Mr Strategy, our problem is not that we do not have a strategy but rather the strategy is old in behaviour, even when the document is new. We still reward activity, not results, tolerate excuses, approve budgets without asking what must stop, protect poor performers because they are familiar, and call meetings to discuss decisions that should have been made two weeks ago.”
The energy in the room changes. The CEO leans forward, the HR director stops typing, the finance manager looks down. For the first time, the real competitor enters the room. It is not another company, not technology or regulation. It is the organisation’s own outdated way of working. Your biggest competitor is not always outside the gate. Sometimes it is sitting inside your performance management system, hiding in your approval matrix, protected by your culture, funded by your budget, and defended by leaders who confuse peace with progress.
Many organisations fail because their operating rhythm is slower than the market, their culture is softer than the ambition, their performance conversations are weaker than the targets, and their strategy is treated as a document to present rather than a discipline to enforce.
The board asks for growth, management asks for resources, departments ask for more staff ,and teams ask for better tools. Yet the deeper question is avoided: what is the organisation currently tolerating that makes growth expensive?
This is where productivity leakage begins, when poor performance is managed through silence, when deadlines are missed without consequence, when budgets are consumed by activities that no longer matter, and when a strategy written for yesterday’s market is used to fight tomorrow’s war. The contradiction leaders must confront
Executives want agile organisations, but many still run annual planning rituals that move like public procurement files.
- They want innovation, but reward compliance with old routines.
- They want accountability, but promote people who are good at explaining failure.
- They want execution, but allow every department to define success in its own language.
That is not strategy but organised drift. A strategy becomes outdated not only when the market changes, but when the organisation’s behaviour fails to change with it. The question for the board and executive team is therefore not, “Do we have a strategy?”
The better question is, “Is our current strategy still strong enough to discipline behaviour, allocate resources, remove waste, confront poor performance, and make the organisation faster than the environment around it?”
If the answer is no, the organisation is not being defeated by competition, it is being defeated by yesterday’s logic. And yesterday’s logic is the most dangerous competitor because it wears the badge of experience, speaks the language of prudence, and looks respectable in the boardroom.
I remain Mr. Strategy
