Leaders Struggle with Corporate Strategy: Top 4 Reasons

Leaders Struggle with Corporate Strategy
Surprised that leaders struggle with corporate strategy? You shouldn’t be. Crafting a thoughtful plan during an strategy offsite retreat is hard enough. Turning that strategy into sustained, organization-wide action is exponentially harder. Yet many leadership teams still underestimate just how difficult it is to design a coherent strategy — and even more challenging to implement it consistently across the enterprise.

The evidence is sobering.

• IBM famously reported that fewer than 10% of well-formulated strategies are successfully executed.
• Our own organizational alignment research reinforces this gap from a different angle: employees rate their understanding of the organization’s strategy as50% less clear than the executive team does. In other words, leaders think they are being clear, while the rest of the organization experiences confusion, ambiguity, or mixed messages.

That disconnect is not a strategy communications glitch. It is a leadership problem.

When strategy lives primarily in executive slide decks or retreat binders, it never becomes operational reality. People cannot align priorities, make smart trade-offs, or change behavior around a strategy they do not fully understand or believe in. As a result, even well-intended strategies stall, fragment, or quietly fail during execution.

By any measure, it is a poor track record — and a costly one.

What’s Going Wrong with Corporate Strategy?  The Top 4 Reasons Leaders Struggle with Corporate Strategy

Why do so many leaders struggle to achieve strategic clarity? After nearly thirty years of working with organizations that wrestle to both craft and execute strategies that actually work, a few patterns have become hard to ignore. The challenge is rarely a lack of intelligence or effort. More often, it is a set of predictable missteps that undermine even the most well-intended strategies.

Drawing on data from our leadership simulation assessments — and years of observing how strategies succeed or fail in real operating environments — we see a consistent group of mistakes that prevent organizations from translating ambition into high growth. These are not theoretical flaws. They are practical breakdowns in how leaders think about, communicate, and execute strategy across the enterprise.

Below are some of the most common errors that keep organizations from realizing the full potential of their corporate strategies:

1. Assessing Organizational Strengths Too Subjectively
   It’s natural to assume your company consistently delivers superior solutions — but perception is not reality. Relying on subjective assessments of your strengths and weaknesses can be a dangerous trap when shaping strategy.

   To create a strategy that actually drives growth, you must be brutally objective about what truly differentiates you from competitors — and where you fall short. If you aren’t crystal clear on how your target clients perceive your organization, you risk building a strategy on assumptions rather than facts.

   Invest the time in a rigorous current-state analysis. Understand your market position, your competitors’ advantages, and the gaps that matter most to the customers who drive your business. Only with this clarity can you design a strategy that is both realistic and compelling.

2. Trying to Replicate the Success of the Competition
   Being in the same industry as your competitors doesn’t mean you can achieve superior results by simply mimicking their approach. Every organization has its own strategic DNA — a combination of culture, capabilities, and talent — that makes true replication impossible. Peak performance comes from leaning into what makes your company distinctive.

   The key is to identify where you can outperform everyone else and center your strategy around that advantage. Chasing the path of your competitors often leads to mediocrity; pursuing your unique strengths creates the conditions for exceptional results. Let your distinctive value proposition and cultural assets guide the design of a strategy that is authentically yours — one built to succeed in your unique context rather than someone else’s.

3. Defining the Business Wrong
   A frequent strategic misstep is misdefining the scope of your business. Kodak famously positioned itself as a film company, failing to anticipate how digital photography would disrupt its industry. Similarly, many hardware-focused companies scrambled to pivot to software, solutions, and cloud services just to remain relevant.

   To avoid this trap, clearly understand the value you deliver to your customers — and recognize that value may not always look the same tomorrow as it does today. Monitor emerging technologies and market shifts that could redefine your business. Staying alert to these changes allows you to adapt proactively rather than reactively, ensuring your strategy aligns with the future, not the past.

4. Not Truly Having a Strategy At All
   The absence of a real strategy — or relying on one that fails to meet the rigorous standards of a workable plan — is perhaps the most critical mistake any organization can make. Our research on organizational alignment shows that strategic clarity alone accounts for up to 31% of the performance gap between high- and low-performing companies.

   A strategy only works when every key stakeholder:
   (1) clearly understands the strategic direction and its implications.
   (2) truly believes the strategy can deliver the intended outcomes.
   (3) is highly confident it can be executed effectively within the organization’s unique culture, industry, and circumstances.

   Without these elements, what exists is not a strategy — it is merely a set of aspirations or intentions, unlikely to produce meaningful results.

The Bottom Line
Leaders can overcome the challenges of corporate strategy — but only by approaching it deliberately and with clarity. A well-designed strategy enables your organization to achieve results far beyond the sum of its parts. Investing the time and effort to create a plan that leverages your unique value proposition, removes strategic bias from your analysis, and focuses on a selective, high-impact path is essential. Strategy is not about doing everything; it is about doing the right things, in the right way, for your organization’s distinct context.

Do your leaders struggle with corporate strategy?   To check if your strategy is clear enough, download 7 Strategic Clarity Warning Signs to Pay Attention To

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.