#TheExecutionGap RIGHT STRATEGY. WRONG STRUCTURE. SAME RESULT.
The strategy was right.
The org built to run it wasn't.
#TheExecutionGap opened with AI outpacing governance.
That is not new. It is the oldest pattern in management, wearing a new interface.
Long before models drifted, structures did.
✅ Execution is a structural capacity, not an individual effort.
Robert M. Grant from SDA Bocconi made the point decades ago:
A brilliant strategy without implementation capability is corporate fantasy.
Most leaders treat execution as a discipline problem, fixable with a better plan or a stronger leader. It rarely is.
Execution lives in reporting lines, decision rights, budget cycles, and who gets penalized for missing this quarter, not the market. Change the strategy without touching those, and the structure wins.
✅ Incentives protect the business that already exists.
In 2000, Netflix's founders offered to sell the company to Blockbuster for $50M. Blockbuster's CEO, John Antioco, turned them down.
DVD by mail looked like a niche, and late fees were still a reliable, profitable revenue line.
In 2004, Antioco convinced the board to drop late fees and launch Blockbuster Online. It worked, briefly outgrowing Netflix in new subscribers.
Activist investor Carl Icahn called the cost unacceptable and pushed Antioco out in 2005. His successor reversed the plan to protect near term profit.
Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, owing more than $900M.
Netflix is worth over $300B today.
Same market, same information, different structure underneath the decision.
McKinsey & Company named this the Execution Trap in 2019: close to 67% of strategies fail in the operational phase, not the design phase.
Its own tracking confirms the trend has not reversed.
In 2010, 35% of executives said their strategy passed four or more of ten quality tests.
By 2024-2025, that share had fallen to 21%.
✅ Governance decides who is allowed to be right too early.
Someone inside most failing companies usually calls the shift correctly, ahead of the market. What kills the strategy is rarely a lack of foresight.
It is the absence of a mechanism protecting the right call long enough to work.
A pivot can be approved, funded, and working, and still get reversed when short term numbers dip and no one defends the horizon it was built for.
Strategy is a decision. Structure is what actually gets executed.
Most reorganizations happen only after the market has already ruled.
The harder discipline: protect the decision before the business needs saving, not after.
If your best strategist proposed killing your most profitable line tomorrow, who has the authority to say yes, and to keep saying it when the numbers get uncomfortable?
STRATEGY IS A DECISION. EXECUTION IS A STRUCTURE.
#TheExecutionGap · Layer 1, Universal Organizational Mechanisms · 1.0, Global Why
#OrganizationalGovernance #StrategyExecution #CommercialStrategy #ContinuousLearning #OriacGimeno