Where Strategy Dies: The Middle Management Problem

Ask an executive committee to state the strategy and you will get a coherent answer. Ask the layer three levels down and you will get four different ones, all of them reasonable.

That drift is not a communications failure. It is what happens when a strategy is expressed as intent rather than as a set of trade-offs someone is accountable for refusing.

Measuring the translation layer

We test it with a simple instrument: ask fifty managers what they would stop doing to fund the strategy. Where the answers converge, execution follows. Where they scatter, the plan is already gone.