PTW/PI All-Stars Book Club – Chapter Eight
Why ‘Execution’ is a Bankrupt Management Concept
Welcome to Chapter Eight of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) book club. Again, in the spirit of a book club discussion, I have responded to all previous comments and will continue to do so. Of the 37 all-star pieces out of the 260 in the series, the randomizer picked Why ‘Execution’ is a Bankrupt Management Concept as the eighth chapter. For this one, we head back to the third biggest category – screeds. You can find the whole PTW/PI series here.
My Reflections on This Piece
Revisiting this topic is cause for some degree of despair. I wrote my first piece on this subject in Harvard Business Review in 2010 – The Execution Trap. It is now 16 years later, and I feel that I have barely made a dent.
But undaunted, I keep writing on the subject. This piece was in 2022 – four years ago. Right before that one was My Least Favorite Business Book of All Time, Execution by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan. I returned to the subject in 2024 with Why You Should be Afraid of ‘Great Execution’. And I have done endless podcasts on the subject.
I have a 25-year rule. That is, to change any deeply imbedded theory or idea, it takes about 25 years. Most, if not all of Peter Drucker’s important ideas – management-by-objectives, knowledge workers, pension fund revolution – took 25 years to go from ‘what the hell are you talking about’ to ‘duh, that is obviously correct.’ I am used to this personally. When I went on my first NYSE company board in 1999 and we discussed our quarterly top and bottom-line guidance, I argued that giving guidance – especially such pinpoint guidance as quarterly profit – was patently stupid. Of course, I was dismissed as an idiot and assured that it was fully impossible to refuse to give guidance. Today, many companies either don’t give guidance at all or give extremely vague guidance with wide ranges. It takes time. It has been 27 years – and of course not a single one of those directors has come back to me to say, ‘gee Roger, guess you had a point.’
But on this one, I just don’t know. The posited distinction between strategy and execution is doctrinal. It is taught in every business school. You are mocked and seen as an effete intellectual – essentially the entire theme of the Bossidy & Charan book – for not buying the characterization of execution as something critically important and distinct from strategy. Even some of my most respected friends disagree with me on this point.
So, why do I persist? It is because the strategy-versus-execution distinction is bad for everyone involved. It gives strategy people a tailor-made excuse for bad strategy, which in turn makes it less likely that strategy will produce the outcomes desired. And because everyone else in the organization knows that they will be blamed for ‘bad execution’ regardless of how stupid the strategy is, they have a depressing and soul-destroying job. And since strategists know that they can blame all failure on ‘bad execution,’ they don’t have to make their strategy at all good – which is one key reason why most strategies in the modern business world suck. But that is not the universal diagnosis, which is that we have an epidemic of bad execution.
At the heart of the problem is managers being lazy on a critical aspect of job design, a topic into which I delved in Jobs to be Assigned earlier in the PTW/PI series. There is a huge difference between the following two job designs for your direct reports:
1) This is my strategy and your job is to execute it.
2) These are my strategy choices – your job is to make a set of strategy choices for your context that are consistent and compatible with mine.
The former is an absolutely demotivating and crummy job. The latter is an exciting, good job. If you assign crummy jobs, you will get bland work. If you assign good jobs, you will get great work. But the dominant theory of execution causes managers to think that are assigning good jobs when they are actually assigning dreadful jobs.
Unfortunately, managers aren’t trained on how to structure and assign good jobs – so it is a daunting challenge for managers. That is why I write things like Chapter Seven PTW/PI All-Star: Strategic Choice Chartering, which I am so pleased was sufficiently popular with readers to be a PTW/PI All-Star.
So, I am going to keep the faith and keep pounding away at the logical silliness of the notion of execution as distinct from strategy. And I will do so until someone can finally give me a definition of execution as distinct from strategy. As far as I am concerned, strategy is the act of making choices under competition, uncertainty and constraints and execution, as described by its aficionados, is the act of making choices under competition, uncertainty and constraints. If they are the same thing, I am not planning to call one ‘strategy’ and the other ‘execution.’
And sorry, Bossidy & Charan, defining execution as “the people process, the strategy process, and the operations process” – i.e. everything that a company does – doesn’t cut it. Of course, execution is more important than strategy if execution includes all of strategy plus a bunch of other important stuff. It is a bit like the parlor game of asking a person which is more popular, coffee or hot coffee. Most people choose hot coffee because it is the most popular type of coffee. But because the category of coffee also includes all hot coffee, coffee is tautologically more popular than hot coffee.
Maybe I am being doctrinaire, but I believe if you define everything a company does to be critical to ‘execution,’ the recipient of that advice doesn’t have much – actually, no – help on what to do. I have to say, it is amazing to me that Bossidy & Charan could write a best seller, the premise of which is: “the single most important thing a company does is everything that the company does.” You would think that it would be laughed off the bookshelves. But no, the doctrine of ‘execution’ is so strong that nutty manifestations of the idea are worshipped.
Unlike them and the many other proponents of ‘execution,’ my job is to provide practical help. On that front, two recommendations float to the top to get the kind of results from your decisions for which you aspire. First, train yourself to never use the word execution. Second, replace using that word with practicing Strategic Choice Chartering. I promise that you will be much more effective.
Reader Comments
This piece had a lot of comments – two dozen – encompassing a wide array of views.
About a half-dozen seemed to genuinely get the point of the article, which was encouraging to me. One described how he used Strategic Choice Chartering successfully. A second commented: “I have no idea how I would make the judgement that a strategy was ‘great’ if in practice it failed miserably.” I concur. All the people who have every told me that ‘a mediocre strategy well executed always beats a great strategy poorly executed’ cannot explain to me how they know a strategy is ‘great’ if it has failed. Interestingly, most who make that argument have no idea why I ask that question. Again, it is the power of doctrine. Stuff doesn’t have to make any logical sense if it is in the category of accepted doctrine. A third commented that: “Blindly believing the outdated strategy vs. execution split can get you killed.” Amen!
So, maybe I should feel that I am making at least a little progress…
Several readers seemed to resonate with the military analogy that I used and liked the reference to Navy Seal Mark Divine’s view of the fallacy of managing for ‘execution.’ I went back and listened to our podcast conversation, and it was worth the revisit. The podcast is here. It is about an hour, but the piece on ‘execution’ is in a six-minute chunk starting at about 24:30. During that segment, he tells a funny story about the contrast between Army and Seal Team doctrine on this front.
The biggest group of commentators say they agree but when they explain further, they reveal that they don’t and they don’t get the core point. For example, one said the following:
“Great piece – fully agree – execution is inherently part of strategy – engaging and enabling people in an organization to understand how to make the best possible choices/decisions builds an enduring strategy capability that fosters sound execution.”
Arghh! He DOES NOT fully agree. He distinguishes between strategy and execution in the same sentence in which he purports to agree. Sigh! Another “agrees” but says that the solution to the problem I describe is to replace the word ‘execution’ with ‘tactics.’ Yet another claims to agree and adds “As a senior leader, I’ve learned that execution doesn’t come from persuasion—it comes from ownership.” It is all proof positive that they simply do not understand the point at hand.
Others said: “great article,” “an enlightening read,” “a wonderful article,” and “simply outstanding” without further commentary, leaving me to wonder whether they are truly in the first group that understands the argument or the second that says they do but don’t.
A third group flat out disagrees. They mainly object by making the fallacious argument that I am dangerously proposing that people should be left to do anything they want. This is a common tactic against my arguments – say that my argument is the exact opposite of what it is and claim that is dangerous. With some, getting smarter is simply not their intent!
Without further ado, the original article…
Chapter Eight
Over the past couple of months, I have had one conversation after another about the central importance of execution in business. Argh! I have an increasingly deep sense that I am fighting a losing battle on this front and have the voice of my late and magnificent mother in my head reminding me that not all battles are winnable. That notwithstanding, I have decided to kick off Year III of the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) series with Why ‘Execution’ is a Bankrupt Management Concept: It is Logically Indefensible AND Bad for You. You can find the previous 111 PTW/PI here.
The Deeply Entrenched Concept of Execution
Execution is one of the most deeply entrenched concepts in all of management, almost as entrenched as the view that earning a profit is better than suffering a loss. The core structure of the concept is that one should first formulate a strategy and then ensure that it is executed.
I think this distinction often stems from the gap between strategy design - carried out by 'thinkers' - and its delivery or materialization (a term I've used in previous comments here) — carried out by 'doers'. I won't claim this is universal, but it's something I've witnessed frequently.
The problem arises when 'thinkers' design strategy without accounting for the realities of its delivery. All the challenges that emerge along the way - the traps, the friction, the unexpected obstacles - tend to be invisible inside the 'strategy room'. When they're ignored at the design stage, they don't disappear; they simply wait to activate and derail the desired outcome. In short, strategic choices are often made without accounting for the practical traps that exist outside that room.
I've written an article on eight competencies of a strategy execution engine — which I could equally describe as the eight must-have capabilities and management systems any organization needs. In my view, these two steps of your Strategy Choice Cascade do a great deal to bridge exactly that gap between strategy design and delivery.
Ahh Roger, so again you face your old arch-enemy, execution! 😅
Yeah, your more typical battle for a genuine understanding of strategy as integrated choices that compel customer choice, something separate from planning, is already tough enough in the face of market status quo. This one, against the separation between strategy and execution, the odds seem insurmountable.
But, if we are to be defined by our enemies, what an incredible one this one is!
Myself, you have provoked me to reflect a lot about this over the years. I fully agree that concepts need to be well-defined and separate from each other, otherwise discussions become silly circular circuses. And yet execution is so commonly seen as something whose meaning aggregates elsewhere-but-not-entirely-separate from strategy… It feels like a business shorthand for something that’s *not* pure strategy.
So here’s my personal take. Execution is this ill-defined umbrella that, in common parlance, does include parts of strategy, of planning, and other things. It’s this weird foggy Venn diagram of management. The challenge, perhaps, is to take better-defined meanings out of it, and see what remains.
When I did the exercise, I ended up clearing five distinct concepts out of it, until nothing of “execution” remained:
1. Strategy - real choices and derived actions, no need to insist on this part of your argument;
2. Planning - commitments taken, ideally following strategy and operating imperatives (unfortunately not always);
3. Alignment - this is where something different begins! Take out too the definition of KPIs, OKRs, BSCs, incentives and such that’s supposed to bind people’s interests together;
4. Enactment - which is basically Pfeffer & Sutton’s “Knowing-Doing” element ie you DO exactly that which you KNOW you have to do;
5. Operational Regime - all that remains of the “execution” after the four above are taken out, essentially the component of building and managing non-strategic / non-enabling systems (Hrebeniak and Vicente Falconi focus a lot of this)
Seeing through this lens and discussing with people, the interesting thing is that many seem to defend that:
- execution and strategy ARE actually different things;
- they have no problem taking #1 and #2 out of execution;
- at #3 they become uncomfortable, feeling like that’s a salient but inseparable part of execution;
- #5 is the closest “actual meaning” of execution;
- but when leaders say they have an “execution problem” the majority of times they intend to mean a problem with #4, a “knowing-doing gap”!
So yeah, silly and amorphous and confusing word with lots of built-in ambiguity.
Which may be exactly why “Execution” survives and thrives in most orgs. Conceptual clarity is a requirement of strategy and good choices, but ambiguity seems to be the default coordination attractor in management. It demands much less intellectual exposure from managers, and tilts rewards to political relationships.
The toughest enemy, indeed…