In 2023, 52% of Fortune 500 companies from the year 2000 had disappeared. The culprit wasn’t bad products or poor execution. It was strategic blindness.
Netflix blindsided Blockbuster. AWS ambushed traditional IT vendors. Tesla outflanked Detroit. In each case, warning signs were visible to frontline employees, customers, and industry observers. The C-suite never heard them.
Research from Strategy& found that companies waste $3.3 trillion annually on misaligned strategy execution globally. The core issue isn’t strategic planning capability but a fundamental disconnect between strategy development and implementation, a broken decision-making process that filters out ground truth before it reaches decision makers.
Prof. Dr. Christian Stadler, Professor of Strategic Management at Warwick Business School, has been a leading advocate of Open Strategy. Speaking on our Innovation Rockstars podcast, Dr. Stadler identified three fatal flaws in how business strategy gets made, flaws that turn competitive advantage into strategic drift.
