Strategy and Tactics

A company's real strategy is not what the CEO says in the annual report — it is where the company puts its money, people, and attention.

When Intel faced declining margins in memory chips in the mid-1980s, the official strategy remained committed to memory. But resource-allocation decisions by middle managers gradually shifted engineering talent toward higher-margin microprocessors. By the time Andy Grove and Gordon Moore made the explicit decision to exit memory in 1985, Intel had already de facto exited through hundreds of tactical allocation choices no one had coordinated.

Most strategies fail not because the strategy was wrong but because the handoff to execution broke down.

Surveys by the Economist Intelligence Unit and McKinsey consistently find that 60–70% of strategies fail in translation. Sull, Homkes, and Sull surveyed 7,600 managers across 262 companies and found the barrier was not alignment — managers largely understood the strategy — but coordination across units. Departments optimised for their own metrics, handoffs broke down, and the promises teams made to each other went untracked.