By Adrian Saville
Strategy has a glamorous reputation. Execution does not. Boardrooms like visions, frameworks and transformation plans; fewer people get excited about checklists, production schedules, factory layouts and deciding when to kill a failed project. Yet this unglamorous territory is where strategy either becomes real or quietly dies.
Robert Kaplan, the Harvard professor, and David Norton, the consultant with whom he developed the balanced scorecard, identified the problem decades ago. Their research found that only 5% of employees understood their organisation’s strategy, 60% of organisations failed to link budgets to it and 85% of executive teams spent less than an hour a month discussing it.
My GIBS elective Operationalising Strategy starts where Kaplan and Norton left off: with the gap between intention and action. As Gal Gadot’s character puts it in Red Notice: “You can have excuses or results. Not both.”
The point was brought to life by six practitioners whose experience suggests that execution is less a science than a collection of disciplines. Each was a guest at my latest presentation of the elective. Each brought important lessons for strategy and execution.
Play the hand you have
Stavros Nicolaou Aspen Pharma Group described strategy as instinct that must be developed rather than learned from a textbook. His own experience makes the case.
Aspen, once run from a Durban house, made the audacious acquisition of South African Druggists and resisted advice to close its factories. That decision later allowed it to manufacture cheaper antiretrovirals and win US FDA approval. During COVID, manufacturing capability again proved valuable.
Sir Raymond Priestley once said that when disaster struck, one should “pray for Shackleton”. Nicolaou’s story suggests something similar about companies: resilience comes from capabilities accumulated before the crisis arrives. The Aspen case, written with Robert Grosse and Albert Wöcke, shows why the strengths you actually possess often matter more than those strategy textbooks prescribe.
Fix the work first
Amy Fane Hervey, who runs AI accelerator Architech, offered a warning for the age of artificial intelligence. Technology is not transformation.
Drawing on the thinking of RAND strategist Herman Kahn, she challenged the notion that technological futures are inevitable. Her prescription is practical: question each step in a process, delete what is unnecessary, simplify what remains, accelerate it and only then automate.
Henry Ford understood the same principle at Highland Park. He did not invent electricity or the motor car; he redesigned production around them. Winston Churchill made a related point when rebuilding the House of Commons: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
Love cash flow, not stories
Mary Bomela brought an investor’s discipline to execution. During her 14 years running the Mineworkers Investment Company, its net asset value rose from R2.8bn to R7.8bn.
Her method was unusually concrete: five strategic priorities, measurable targets, disciplined acquisitions and exits, and an investment scorecard designed to ensure enthusiasm survived contact with evidence. One failed investment produced her sharpest lesson: “love cash flow, not stories.”
It is advice Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, would have recognised. Growth is not automatically value creation; debt magnifies mistakes and governance matters enormously.
Find the crux
Dr Paulina Mamogobo DBA (GIBS),MBL(UNISA),M.Inst.D, chief economist at naamsa, applied Richard Rumelt’s idea of the “crux”—the hardest problem that determines whether a strategy can succeed—to South Africa’s motor industry.
The country exports most of the vehicles it builds yet imports most of those it buys. Its factories compete with plants in Thailand, Argentina, Spain and elsewhere for global production mandates. The uncomfortable strategic question is therefore not simply how to make more cars, but how South Africa makes itself indispensable enough to keep making them.
Know when the ship has sunk
Hennie Heymans of DHL Express Sub-Saharan Africa supplied another useful rule: know when to stop.
DHL once pursued its own delivery drone. The mistake was not trying; it was taking too long to concede that the project was failing. Heymans now deliberately seeks views from people with no stake in major decisions. They ask the questions insiders overlook.
It recalls Ernest Shackleton’s response when Endurance sank: “Well boys, she’s gone. So now we’ll go home.”
Heymans also described how former DHL Express chief executive Ken Allen imposed a startlingly simple strategy built around motivated people, service quality, loyal customers and a profitable network. Execution meant ensuring that everyone, from senior management to the courier, understood their role.
Fight on your own terms
Cheslyn Jacobs, chief executive of GoTyme Bank, offered the final variation.
Like Ferruccio Lamborghini challenging Enzo Ferrari, GoTyme refused to compete entirely on the incumbent’s terms. Its kiosks in retailers challenged both the traditional bank branch and Brett King’s vision of purely digital banking.
The case, written with Anastacia Mamabolo and Bruce Whitfield, illustrates what political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft found in asymmetric warfare: weaker players improve their chances when they refuse to fight stronger opponents in the obvious way.
Jacobs calls the next frontier “emotional access”: designing banking around how people actually behave rather than how financial institutions imagine they should.
Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic journals often recorded circumstances conspiring against him. Roald Amundsen recorded miles travelled.
That may be the neatest distinction between strategy and execution. The weather matters. The plan matters. But eventually someone has to count the miles.
*This article was adapted from a piece by Adrian Saville. Read the full article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-rubber-meets-sky-adrian-saville-jm2qf/
