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SPOTLIGHT ON THE EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION

The Execution Trap

by Roger L. Martin•

Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:

Idea in Brief—the core idea

1 Article Summary

3 The Execution Trap

Drawing a line between

strategy and execution almost

guarantees failure.

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S P O T L I G H T O N T H E E F F E C T I V E O R G A N I Z A T I O N

The Execution Trap

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Idea in Brief

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It’s commonly held that strategy is distinct from execution, but this is a flawed assump-tion. The idea that a strategy can be brilliant and its execution poor is simply wrong.

The metaphor accompanying this view-point is that of the human body, with the brain as the “chooser” and the body as the “doer.” Translated into the workplace, the executive at the top dictates the strategy and expects everyone below him to me-chanically carry it out.

A better metaphor is that of a white-water river, where choices cascade from the top to the bottom. In a company, those in charge make broader and more abstract “upstream” choices, and employees down-stream are empowered to make choices that best fit the situation at hand. This results in happier customers and more-satisfied employees.

To best enable individual decisions, choice makers upstream should set the general context for those downstream. From there, employees need to use good judgment to make the best decisions possible. The au-thors detail four ways those at the top can help.

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION

The Execution Trap

by Roger L. Martin

harvard business review • july–august 2010 page 3

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Drawing a line between strategy and execution almost guarantees

failure.

The idea that execution is distinct from strat-egy has become firmly ensconced in manage-ment thinking over the past decade. So muchso, in fact, that if you run a Google search for“A mediocre strategy well executed is betterthan a great strategy poorly executed,” youwill get more than 42,600 references. Wherethe idea comes from is not certain, but in2002, in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble,Jamie Dimon, now CEO of JPMorgan Chase,opined, “I’d rather have a first-rate executionand second-rate strategy any time than a bril-liant idea and mediocre management.” In thesame year, Larry Bossidy, former AlliedSignalCEO, coauthored the best-selling book Execu-tion: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, inwhich the authors declared, “Strategies mostoften fail because they aren’t well executed.”

The trouble is, Dimon and Bossidy’s doc-trine—that execution is the key to a strategy’ssuccess—is as flawed as it is popular. That pop-ularity discourages us from questioning theprinciple’s validity. Let’s suppose you had a the-ory that heavenly objects revolve around the

Earth. Increasingly, you find that this theorydoesn’t predict the movement of the stars andplanets very well. Is it more rational to respondby questioning the theory that the universe re-volves around the Earth or to keep positingever more complicated, convoluted, and im-probable explanations for the discrepancy? Ap-plying Dimon and Bossidy’s doctrine ratherthan Occam’s razor would have you going in alot of unnecessary and useless circles.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what oftenhappens when people are trying to under-stand why their strategy is failing, especiallywhen consulting firms are involved. In fact,Dimon and Bossidy’s approach can be a god-send for these firms because it allows them toblame their clients for any mistakes theymight make. Firms can in effect say, “It won’tbe our strategy advice that will let you downbut your implementation of that strategy. (Tohelp you get around that problem, we suggestthat we do some change management workfor you as well.)”

Of course, lining the pockets of consulting

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION•••The Execution Trap

page 4 harvard business review • july–august 2010

firms does nothing to further most companies’performance. I suggest a superior way to pro-ceed. Rather than doubling down on the pre-vailing theory to try to get it to work, considerthe simple possibility that the theory is wrong.

So let’s evaluate the idea of the brilliantstrategy poorly executed. If a strategy producespoor results, how can we argue that it is bril-liant? It certainly is an odd definition of bril-liance. A strategy’s purpose is to generate posi-tive results, and the strategy in questiondoesn’t do that, yet it was brilliant? In whatother field do we proclaim something to bebrilliant that has failed miserably in its only at-tempt? A “brilliant” Broadway play that closesafter one week? A “brilliant” political cam-paign that results in the other candidate win-ning? If we think about it, we must accept thatthe only strategy that can legitimately becalled brilliant is one whose results are exem-plary. A strategy that fails to produce a greatoutcome is simply a failure.

As I hope to show in the following pages, theidea that we have to choose between a medio-cre, well-executed strategy and a brilliant,poorly executed one is deeply flawed—a nar-row, unhelpful concept replete with unin-tended negative consequences. But the goodnews is that if we change the way we thinkabout the problem of strategy versus execu-tion, we can change the outcome.

Let’s begin by exploring the consequences ofthe prevailing view of strategy.

A Misguided MetaphorAccording to the accepted dogma, strategy isthe purview of senior managers, who, oftenaided by outside consultants, formulate it andthen hand off its execution to the rest of theorganization. The pervasive metaphor that in-forms our understanding of this process is thatof the human body. The brain (top manage-ment) thinks and chooses, and the body (theorganization) does what the brain tells it to do.Successful action is made up of two distinct el-ements: formulation in the brain and execu-tion through the body. At the formulationstage, the brain decides, “I will pick up thisfork now.” Then, at the implementation stage,the hand dutifully picks up the fork. The handdoesn’t choose—it does. The flow is one-way,from the formulator brain to the implementerhand. That hand becomes a “choiceless doer.”

A neuroscientist may quibble with this sim-

plification of the brain and body (and of thetrue order of operations between them), butit’s a fair description of the accepted model oforganizational strategy: Strategy is choosing;execution is doing.

To make this more concrete, consider the ex-ample of a large retail bank. The CEO and histeam formulate a customer strategy. They flowthat strategy down to the bank’s branches,where it is executed by the customer servicerepresentatives (CSRs) on a day-to-day basis.The CSRs are the choiceless doers. They followa manual that tells them how to treat the cus-tomers, how to process transactions, whichproducts to promote, and how to sell them.The hard work of making all those choices isleft to the higher-ups. Those on the front linesdon’t have to choose at all—they just do.

Now consider an experience I had workingwith a large retail bank in the early 1980s. Thebank was revising its strategy and, as a youngconsultant, I asked to shadow a teller to get abetter sense of the bank’s operations. I was as-signed to Mary, who was the top teller in herbranch. As I observed her over the course of afew weeks, I began to see a pattern in the wayMary dealt with her customers. With some, shewas polite, efficient, and professional. Withothers, she would take a little longer, perhapssuggesting that they transfer some of the extramoney in their checking account to a higher-yielding term deposit or explaining new ser-vices the bank had introduced. And with somecustomers she would ask about their children,their vacations, or their health but relate verylittle about banking and finances. The transac-tions still got done in these instances of infor-mality but took far longer than the other cus-tomer interactions did. Mary seemed to treateach of her customers in one of these three dis-tinct ways.

After a while, I took Mary aside and askedabout her approach. “Customers come inthree general flavors,” she explained. “Thereare those who don’t really like banking. Theywant to come in, do their deposits or trans-fers, and get out again painlessly. They wantme to be friendly but to manage the transac-tions as quickly as possible. If I tried to givethem financial advice, they would say ‘That’snot your job.’ ”

“Then there’s the second kind of customer,who isn’t interested in my being her friend butthinks of me as her personal financial service

Roger L. Martin ([email protected]) is the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the Universi-ty of Toronto. He is the author of The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2009).

The Execution Trap•••SPOTLIGHT ON THE EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION


manager. This customer wants me to be watch-ing her other accounts.” She pulled out adrawer and pointed to a set of small file cards.“For those customers, I make up these littlefiles that keep me posted on all of their ac-counts. This lets me offer them specific ad-vice—because that’s what they want from me.If I were to ask about their children or their hipsurgery, they’d feel as if I were wasting theirtime or, worse yet, intruding into their lives.”

“Finally, there’s a group of people who view abranch visit as an important social event, andthey’ve come in part to visit their favorite teller.If you watch the lineup, you’ll see some peopleactually let others go ahead of them and waitfor a specific teller to be available. With thosefolks, I have to do their banking, but I also needto talk to them about their lives. If I don’t, itwon’t be the event that they want, and they’llbe disappointed with our service.”

Intrigued, I asked Mary to show me in theteller manual where it described this strategicsegmentation scheme and the differential ser-vice models. Mary went white as a sheet, be-cause of course none of this was in the manual.“It’s just something I’ve tried,” she explained. “Iwant customers to be happy, so I do whatever Ican to make that happen.”

“But for the middle segment,” I pressed, “youhave to make these files yourself, cobble some-thing together that bank systems could be de-signed to provide.” (Of course bank systems dideventually catch up, and banks created sophis-ticated computerized customer informationfiles that looked a lot like Mary’s file cards.)“And frankly,” I continued, “other tellers andcustomers could benefit from your approach.Why don’t you talk to your bank managerabout the three segments and suggest doingthings differently?”

That was too much for Mary. “Why would Iever do that?” she replied, suddenly impa-tient. “I’m just trying to do my job as best Ican. They’re not interested in what a tellerhas to say.”

Mary had been set up as a choiceless doer.She had been given a manual that essentiallysaid, “It’s all about the transaction—just do thetransaction and be friendly.” But her own expe-rience and insight told her otherwise. Shechose to build and implement her own cus-tomer service model, understanding that theultimate goal of the bank was to create happycustomers. To do that, she had to reject her role

as a choiceless doer. Rather than obey the tellermanual and deliver subpar service, she decidedto make choices within her own sphere. Shehad decided, dare I say, to be strategic.

But Mary understood just as clearly thatshe was in no position to influence the deci-sions made at the top of her organization. Al-though she had chosen to reject the conven-tional, her superiors had not. So the bank,which could have benefited from her strategicinsights, was shut out. It’s a pattern I haveseen again and again throughout my career.Often, what senior management neededmost—although it was rarely able to recog-nize it—was to have someone talk with therank and file in order to understand what wasreally happening in the business. Senior man-agement couldn’t get that information itselfbecause it had created a model in which itsemployees were convinced that no one wasinterested in what they had to say.

The Choiceless-Doer DilemmaThe strategy-execution model fails at multiplelevels of the organization, not just at the frontline. Executives, too, are constrained—by theboards, shareholders, regulators, and count-less others that dictate to them. Everyonefrom the top of the organization all the waydown to the very bottom makes choices underconstraints and uncertainty. Each time a front-line employee responds to a customer request,he is making a choice about how to representthe corporation—a choice directly related to

A Warning UnheededMost managers are so used to believing that strategy and execution are distinct from one another that they are blind to whether the strategy-execution approach makes any sense. The notion that strategy and execution are connected isn’t new. But apparently we didn’t listen carefully enough to the great management theorist Kenneth Andrews, who established the distinction between the formulation of a strategy and its execu-tion in his 1971 book, The Concept of Corporate Strategy. He wrote,

“Corporate strategy has two equally important aspects, interrelated in life but separated to the extent practicable here in our study of the concept. The first of these is formulation; the second is implementation.”

Despite the warning that strategy formulation and implementation or execution are “interrelated in life” and “equally important,” four decades later, the strategy-execution theory artificially conceptualizes them as separate. It is high time that we delved a little deeper into the twisted logic of our current approach. If we don’t, we are almost certain to fail.



the fundamental value proposition the com-pany is offering.

So if we can’t draw a line in the organizationabove which strategy happens and below whichexecution does, what is the use of the distinc-tion between strategy and execution, betweenformulation and implementation? The answeris none at all. It is a pointless distinction that inno way helps the organization. In fact, it doesgreat damage to the corporation.

In some cases, employees internalize thechoiceless-doer model and stick to it faithfully.The employee follows hard-and-fast rules, see-ing only black and white because that is whatshe has been told to see. Her perception ofwhat her superiors expect drives her behavior.She attempts to achieve faithful executionrather than basing her actions on choicesabout what would be best for the customerwithin the broad bounds of the strategy of thecorporation. This constrains her choices, andturns her into a bureaucrat. Any customer whohas ever heard the words, “I’m sorry, there isnothing I can do; it’s company policy” or whohas called an offshore service call center andlistened to the faraway representative readthrough a script that’s utterly unconnected tothe problem in front of him knows the pain ofdealing with a bureaucrat in a choiceless-doerframework.

In other cases, employees quickly learn therules of the game and become mechanicallyobedient. Then they become disillusioned anddisconnected. Meanwhile, managers, blindedby the rigidness of the strategy-executionmodel they have come to know, make high-level abstract choices and assume that every-thing else is simple implementation. They failto recognize that the choices made at the topwill beget a whole array of difficult choicesdown the line. If employees make soundchoices and produce great results, senior man-agement gets (and usually takes) credit for hav-ing put in place a great strategy. If, on theother hand, there are poor results (whetherdue to bad choices by management, by em-ployees, or both), the conclusion will almostcertainly be that there was flawed execution.The employees are players in a lose-lose game:little credit if their team wins, lots of blame iftheir team loses. This bind creates a sense ofhelplessness, rather than a sense of joint re-sponsibility for success. Inevitably, employeesdecide simply to punch their time cards rather

than reflect on how to make things work bet-ter for their corporation and its customers.

It’s a vicious circle. Feeling disconnected,employees elect not even to try to share cus-tomer data with senior managers. Senior man-agers then must work around their own orga-nization to get the data necessary to makedecisions, typically by hiring outside consult-ants. Frontline employees find the resultingchoices inexplicable and unconvincing, be-cause the data comes from outside the organi-zation. The employees feel even more discon-nected from the company and moreconvinced, as Dilbert would say, that they areworking for idiots. Senior management blamesthe frontline employees, frontline employeesblame management, and eventually, everyonebecomes belligerent. Management imposes ex-ecutional rules and ways of operating that feelunilateral and arbitrary, and frontline workersact against the spirit of the strategy and with-hold data that would aid in decision making.

In this cold, self-centered world, relation-ships between levels of the organization do notdevelop or develop with mistrust. Reflectiontends to be limited to what impact those in therest of the system will have on an individual’sability to succeed; the person does not considerhis own possible contribution to the problem.Finally, leadership tends to take too much re-sponsibility for success by planning ever more-complex strategies and ever more-stringent im-plementation plans, while the middle- andlower-level managers see these efforts, feelhelpless, and back off from taking responsibil-ity. These are some of the inevitable costs ofthe mainstream strategy-execution approach.

Strategy as a Choice CascadeTo fix our problem with strategy failure, weneed to stop thinking in terms of the brain-to-body metaphor. Instead, we should conceiveof the corporation as a white-water river inwhich choices cascade from the top to the bot-tom. Each set of rapids is a point in the corpo-ration where choices could be made, with eachupstream choice affecting the choice immedi-ately downstream. Those at the top of thecompany make the broader, more abstractchoices involving larger, long-term invest-ments, whereas the employees toward the bot-tom make more concrete, day-to-day decisionsthat directly influence customer service andsatisfaction.

Making a distinction

between strategy and

execution can do great

damage to a corporation.



At the CEO level, the choice might be asbroad as “In what businesses will we partici-pate?” The CEO would consult and considerbroadly—within the constraints imposed byhis board, investors, company history, re-sources, and so on—and make a choice.

Let’s say the CEO decides that the companywill invest heavily in the U.S. retail bankingbusiness. Given that decision, the president ofthat business unit might then ask, “How willwe seek to win in U.S. retail banking?” Herchoice is still quite broad and abstract, but it isexplicitly bound by the choice made above her.She decides that the company will win in theretail banking business through superior cus-tomer service. From there, yet more choicesfollow throughout the organization. The EVPof branch operations might ask, “What servicecapabilities must we develop to deliver consis-tently superior customer service?” If the an-swer includes ease of interaction for the cus-tomer at the branch, the branch managermight ask, “What does that mean for the hiringand training of CSRs and the scheduling oftheir shifts?” And the rep on a given desk hasto ask, “What does all that mean for this cus-tomer, right here, right now?”

It can be a very long cascade from the top tothe bottom in a large corporation. In the bankexample, there would probably be both a re-gional and an area manager between the EVPand the branch manager. As the cascade grows,its structure and operating principles becomemore critical. For the decision-making process towork most effectively, each choice must be inte-grated seamlessly with the others. In this model,employees are encouraged to make thoughtfulchoices within the context of the decisions madeabove them. The approach rests on the beliefthat empowering employees to make choices intheir sphere will produce better results, happiercustomers, and more-satisfied employees.

The choice-cascade model isn’t nearly as per-vasive as the strategy-execution model, but it isimplicitly in use in some of most successfulcompanies in the world. Consider Four Sea-sons Hotels and Resorts, one of the world’sleading high-end hotel chains. Early on, chair-man and CEO Isadore Sharp made the decisionto build his hotel chain based not on obsequi-ous service and formal decor but on a new def-inition of luxury. He decided, he said, “to rede-fine luxury as service, a support system to fill infor the one left at home and the office.”

The problem, of course, was how to get em-ployees at every level to make choices that re-alized this desired outcome. Traditionally,hotel employees were poorly paid and consid-ered transient and replaceable. Most hotelchains treated their workers as choiceless doerswho were told precisely what to do, when todo it, and how—while watching them like ahawk. But the choiceless-doer model wouldhave been the death of Sharp’s vision. Heneeded every employee, from chambermaid tovalet to desk clerk to hotel manager, to makethe choices necessary to create a comfortable,welcoming support system for guests. It wouldhave been impossible to make a step-by-stepinstruction manual of how to create the sup-port system he imagined. So Sharp set out asimple, easy-to-understand context withinwhich his employees could make informedchoices. The goal for everyone at Four Seasonswould be “to deal with others—partners, cus-tomers, coworkers, everyone—as we wouldwant them to deal with us.”

The Golden Rule—which Sharp, like mostof us, learned as child—proved to be a power-ful tool for aligning the cascade of choices atFour Seasons within his chosen context. If aFour Seasons customer had a complaint,every single employee was empowered tomake it right in the way that made the mostsense to her and treat the guest with the con-cern and care she herself would like to re-ceive. And Sharp has walked the talk, treatinghis employees as he would want to be treated,as he wanted his guests to be treated. He hasdone it, he says, “by paying as much attentionto employee complaints as guest complaints,by upgrading employee facilities wheneverwe upgraded a hotel, by disallowing class dis-tinctions in cafeterias and parking lots, bypushing responsibility down and encouragingself-discipline, by setting performance highand holding people accountable, and most ofall adhering to our credo: generating trust.”

In short, he did it by letting his peoplechoose. The results have been remarkable.Four Seasons is one of just 13 companies in theworld to appear on Fortune’s list of The 100Best Companies to Work For every year sincethe list’s inception. The company also ranksfirst in its category in the J.D. Power and Asso-ciates’ annual Hotel Guest Satisfaction Indexand is routinely honored in the Condé NastTraveler Readers’ Choice Awards.

When workers are made

to feel empowered, the

whole organization wins.



Of course, this empowerment doesn’t hap-pen without some encouragement. Leaderslike Sharp work hard to create a context inwhich people below them in the choice cas-cade understand the choices that have alreadybeen made and the rationale for them. Thoseat the top must also be prepared to engage indiscussion—without dominating it—aroundthe downstream choices at each level. This canbe made more credible if the leader makes itclear to subordinates that the results fromtheir downstream decisions affect not onlythemselves but also the upstream decisions onwhich their choices were predicated (see thesidebar “A Cascade of Better Choices”).

Creating a Virtuous Strategy CycleThe choice-cascade model has a positive-reinforcement loop inherent within it. Be-cause downstream choices are valued andfeedback is encouraged, the framework en-ables employees to send information back up-stream, improving the knowledge base of deci-sion makers higher up and enabling everyonein the organization to make better choices.The employee is now not only the brain butalso the arms and legs of the organizationalbody. He is both a chooser and a doer. Workers

are made to feel empowered, and the wholeorganization wins.

This idea isn’t new. Progressive managementthinkers have been talking about worker em-powerment for decades. But that fact raises animportant question: With all that empower-ment going on, why do so many people stillthink that execution is all that matters? Oneanswer could be that the firms those peoplework for do a terrible job of empowering theiremployees. But if that were the only problem,they’d just need to empower more and every-thing would be fixed (in other words, use thesame old theory, and just apply it more rigor-ously). This isn’t really empowerment butrather those at the top trying to get workers tobuy in to their ideas. As those in charge formu-late their strategy, they work with change man-agement consultants to determine how theycan generate the buy-in they need. They pro-duce workshops and PowerPoint presentationsto persuade those below them to be enthusias-tic about the chosen strategy and to execute itmechanically as choiceless doers.

Senior managers who focus solely on win-ning buy-in from those below them don’t tendto ask themselves, “How would I like it if Iwere on the receiving end?” If they did, they’d

A Cascade of Better ChoicesUnlike with the strategy-execution approach, in which leaders dictate set strategies and expect subordinates to mechanically follow, the choice-cascade model has senior managers empower workers by allowing them to use their best judg-ment in the scenarios they encounter. But to ef-fectively enable those individual choices, a choice maker “upstream” must set the context for those downstream. At each level, the choice maker can help his employees make better choices in four specific ways.

1. Explain the choice that has been made and

the rationale for it. Too often we mistakenly as-sume that our reasoning is clear to others be-cause it is clear to us. We must take the time to be explicit about the choice we have made and the reasons and assumptions behind that choice, while allowing the opportunity for those down-stream to ask questions. Only when the people immediately downstream understand the choice and the rationale behind it will they feel empow-

ered rather than artificially constrained.

2. Explicitly identify the next downstream

choice. We must articulate what we see as the next choice, and engage in a downstream discus-sion to ensure that the process feels like a joint venture that is informed by a hierarchy. Those upstream must guide and inform those down-stream, not leave them to make decisions blindly.

3. Assist in making the downstream choice as

needed. Part of being a boss is helping subordi-nates make their choices when they need it. The extent of help required will vary from case to case, but a genuine offer should always be a part of the process.

4. Commit to revisiting and modifying the

choice based on downstream feedback. We can-not ever know that a given choice is a sound one until the downstream choices are made and re-sults roll in. Hence, the superior has to signal that his choice is truly open to reconsideration and review.



probably realize that it seemed detestable. Itviolates the Four Seasons version of theGolden Rule. Employees don’t like the buy-inapproach because it creates an artificial dis-tinction between strategy and execution. Theyare expected to sit there and act as if theyenjoy being treated as choiceless doers whenthey know they have to be something else forthis “brilliant” strategy and its attendant buy-inprocess to be successful. As always, upstreamtheories, and the decisions based on those the-ories, constrain downstream experiences. Inthis case, an upstream theory that divides acompany into choosers and choiceless doers

turns empowerment into a sham.It’s time to revisit and revise our upstream

theory. The business world may be utterly con-vinced that better execution is the path togreatness, but in truth, a better metaphorwould be much more helpful. Only then willthe rank-and-file employees of organizationsbe free of the scourge of buy-in sessions. Andonly then will the promise of empowermenthave a chance of being realized.

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