#TheExecutionGap YOU DON'T NEED A BETTER STRATEGY. YOU NEED A SYSTEM THAT TELLS THE TRUTH.
Boeing self-certified 96% of its own work.
Two crashes later, the world found out.
The execution gap never shows up on the P&L first.
It shows up as a pattern: fragmented decisions, inflated metrics, adoption without impact, months or years before the financial statement forces the board to react.
Bain & Company research (HBR, 2017) found executives lose 40% of a strategy's potential value to execution breakdowns.
Five signals. Five cases. Five checks.
✅ Governance fragmentation. Case: Boeing 737 MAX (2005 to 2019)
Boeing held delegated authority to certify roughly 96% of its own aircraft under an FAA program formalized in 2005.
No external party owned the safety decision end to end.
By the 2018 and 2019 crashes, investigators found the delegation had drifted past auditable limits.
Check: Name who can kill your riskiest initiative without an independent layer of escalation.
✅ KPI inflation. Case: Wells Fargo (2011 to 2016)
Wells Fargo tied pay to a cross-sell quota of eight products per customer from 2011.
Employees hit the number by opening over a million unauthorized accounts, a practice that surfaced in 2016.
Check: Pick your fastest-rising KPI and name what gets sacrificed, unmeasured, to keep it climbing.
✅ False adoption. Case: IBM Watson Health (2015 to 2022)
IBM spent close to $4 billion building Watson Health starting in 2015.
Adoption of the interface never translated into routine clinical decisions, since healthcare workflows around it stayed largely unchanged.
IBM sold the assets in 2022 for $1 billion.
Check: For your most-used tool, name one decision it actually changed.
✅ Executive latency. Case: JCPenney (2012)
Ron Johnson rolled out a nationwide pricing overhaul in a single move in February 2012, no test market.
Same store sales fell 31.7% before the data reached the board, and the company lost $4.3 billion that year.
A separate Bain & Company study found fast-moving organizations grow revenue 2.5x faster and return 3x more to shareholders.
Check: Time the gap between your last major call and the first data point that could have flagged it.
✅ Obsolete assumptions. Case: Kodak (1975 to 2012)
Kodak's own engineers invented the digital camera in 1975.
The company shelved it to protect film revenue, an assumption that held until bankruptcy in 2012.
Check: Name the assumption your plan depends on that hasn't been tested this year.
None of these organizations lacked intelligence.
They lacked a mechanism that could tell leadership the truth early enough.
Which signal is active in your organization right now, and who's actually accountable for it?
YOU DON'T NEED A BETTER STRATEGY. YOU NEED A SYSTEM THAT TELLS THE TRUTH BEFORE THE MARKET FORCES IT TO.
#TheExecutionGap · Layer 1, Universal Organizational Mechanisms · 1.1, Global How
#OrganizationalGovernance #StrategyExecution #ExecutiveLeadership #OriacGimeno