By Roger Martin
IN business, it is sometimes said that “a mediocre strategy well executed will always trump a great strategy poorly executed.” It’s a good sound bite, but there is no objective basis by which a strategy can be declared “great” in the event that its results are bad. And even when the results are good, you can’t be sure that the strategy is.
At its most basic level, strategy is about making choices—and the choices need to be made from the top of the organization to the bottom. Managers (and many academics) distinguish between these choices, calling those made by senior managers “strategy” and those made lower down the pecking order “execution.” But all the choices are, in fact, strategic. In the real world, there is no meaningful distinction between strategy and execution.
It’s true that a strategy is only as good as the weakest link in the choice-making chain. If “well executed” simply means that choices lower down a strategy’s cascade of choices are pretty good, then a strategy whose choices at the top were mediocre could indeed trump a cascade that starts off with great decisions at the top but then meets a very poor one somewhere down the chain.
But making a distinction between execution and strategy is still wrongheaded, because it diminishes the likelihood that the people low in the strategy cascade will actually make good choices. When you call choices strategic, people pay more attention to them and think about them as true choices. Calling their decisions “execution,” by comparison, makes people feel that they don’t actually face or make choices, and so they think less about what they’re doing. Since the strategy’s success is a function of the quality of the weakest choice, the “strategy” and “execution” distinction is dooming the strategies of those who subscribe to it.
Roger Martin is a professor at and former dean of the Rotman School of Management. He is the co-author of Getting Beyond Better and Playing to Win.