Most war rooms (boardrooms) have experienced it. The annual strategy offsite ends with applause, applause gives way to press releases, and everyone leaves convinced they’ve charted a course for greatness. Yet, months later, the strategy binder gathers dust while the organization drifts back to “business as usual.”
It is one of the most frustrating realities for executives alike: the realization that a beautifully crafted strategy, without disciplined execution, is nothing more than a cold spark, brilliant in potential, but incapable of producing lasting heat.
Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan (2002) put it plainly: “Execution is the ability to mesh strategy with reality, align people with goals, and achieve the promised results.” In other words, the bridge between ambition and achievement is not the plan itself, it’s the operating discipline that turns that plan into outcomes.
Kodak: An Invention Without the Fuel to Transform
The story of Eastman Kodak is a powerful reminder that innovation alone does not guarantee transformation. In 1975, Kodak’s engineers built a working digital camera, decades ahead of its time. Yet by the late 2000s, the company was in steep decline, eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2012.
The failure was not technological. Executives understood the disruptive potential of digital imaging, and engineers had already demonstrated its viability. The collapse came from executional breakdown: resource allocation that favored the legacy film business, governance that lacked urgency, and incentives that rewarded the preservation of the past rather than the pursuit of the future.
In essence, Kodak had the spark but failed to feed it fuel.
The Familiar Failure Modes: Why “Cold Sparks” Persist
Years of strategy research and post-mortem analyses reveal that organizations fall into these predictable traps that stall execution:
- Resource Misallocation: New initiatives receive less funding than entrenched operations.
- Cultural Inertia and Risk Aversion: Fear of cannibalizing existing revenue streams slows decision-making.
- Siloed Ownership and Weak Governance: No single, empowered leader drives the initiative forward.
- Misaligned Measurement and Incentives: KPIs reward legacy performance, starving strategic innovation.
These patterns are not just historical curiosities, they are current, living risks in many organizations today.
Why Execution Is the Board’s Business
Jack Welch famously advised: Pick a direction and implement it like hell. But implementation at scale does not happen by accident. It requires:
- Resource Commitment: Aligning budget and talent with declared priorities.
- Governance Sponsorship: Sustained leadership attention at both board and C-suite levels.
- Cultural Readiness: Embedding adaptability and calculated risk-taking.
- Clear Accountability: Empowering initiative owners with authority and visibility.
- Performance Measurement: Using KPIs that anticipate the future, not just record the past.
Boards that treat execution as a secondary matter risk becoming the stewards of strategic post-mortems rather than success stories.
Strategies inspire; execution delivers. Kodak’s fall, and countless similar examples, remind us that the real challenge of leadership is not drafting an elegant plan, it’s ensuring that the plan survives contact with reality. For boards, this means continuously monitoring execution risks, aligning incentives with future value, and ensuring that strategic sparks are fed with the fuel they need to burn bright and long.
As Bossidy and Charan (2002) argue, execution is not just a tactical detail; it is the discipline of business itself. Without it, a strategy is merely a promise deferred.
References
Bossidy, L., & Charan, R. (2002). Execution: The discipline of getting things done. Crown Business.
Christensen, C. M. (1997). The innovator’s dilemma: When new technologies cause great firms to fail. Harvard Business School Press.
Lucas, H. C., & Goh, J. M. (2009). Disruptive technology: How Kodak missed the digital photography revolution. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 18(1), 46–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsis.2009.01.002
Mui, C. (2012, January 18). How Kodak failed. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2012/01/18/how-kodak-failed
Neilson, G. L., Martin, K. L., & Powers, E. (2008). The secrets to successful strategy execution. Harvard Business Review, 86(6), 60–70.
Simons, R. (2000). Performance measurement and control systems for implementing strategy. Prentice Hall.
