On October 15th, 2025, in partnership with WorkBoard and Profit.co, a select group of leaders came together to reveal 18 months of global research analyzing 500+ organizations. What they uncovered challenges conventional wisdom: 67% of strategies still fail to deliver results – not because of poor planning, but because execution and strategy remain fundamentally disconnected. This powerful 60-minute panel discussion goes beyond surface-level tactics to explore the hard truths about why organizations fail at execution and what the top 11% are doing differently.
Event Key Takeaways
- Communicating ≠ Understanding: Leaders confuse communication with alignment. True alignment is a two-way process where teams understand the impact on their work and leadership understands the consequences
- “Alignment Theatre” Dilutes Real Outcomes: Organizations excel at cascading vision but fail to build the systems (budget integration, governance, learning loops) that make strategy operational, creating an illusion of alignment
- It’s Not a Knowledge Gap, It’s an “Ego Gap”: People’s self-interest and perceived interests interfere with alignment and collaboration. Before strategy fails in execution, it fails in human behavior through personal biases and social contagion
- Transparency Requires Courage: Strategy execution leads to transparency, which means recognizing wrong decisions and bad calls – everything humans naturally avoid discussing
- Discipline Beats the “Agility” Hype: Large organizations with disciplined systems and operational rigor consistently outperform those confusing agility with chaos
- AI Will Amplify, Not Equalize: 90% of AI projects aren’t delivering ROI. AI will accelerate execution for those already doing it well while exposing dysfunction in organizations that aren’t
