Execution fails before it starts, and most leaders never see it coming

Strategy execution is a leadership problem, not a methodology problem. And it starts long before the plan is launched.

Most organizations are better at writing strategies than executing them. The gap between the two, says Elda Simonska, Associate Professor at HEC Paris and Academic Director of the Strategy in the C-Suite program, has nothing to do with the plan's quality. It’s about what leaders do and avoid doing before the plan is launched.

Professor Simonska has spent years working with executives on exactly this problem. Her diagnosis is consistent: execution fails not because of market conditions, organizational complexity, or lack of resources, but because of leadership.

Three biases that blind leaders to the real problem

The leaders who struggle most with execution are not, in Simonska's experience, the ones who lack intelligence. They are the ones who have too much confidence in a particular kind of intelligence. She identifies three biases that sabotage execution before it begins.

1. The first is analytical bias: the conviction that only what can be logically structured and reasoned through deserves attention. If it can't be mapped, modeled, or argued in a slide deck, it doesn't count. 

    

2. The second is quantification bias: the belief that only what can be measured is real. Culture, trust, informal power networks… none of these show up cleanly in a dashboard, so they get deprioritized. 

    

3. The third is what she calls adrenaline bias: the addiction to short-term results, the quarterly race that makes everything slower, subtler, and harder to see feel like a distraction rather than the actual work.

None of this is new. What makes Simonska's reading useful is that she doesn't treat these biases as pathologies to correct, but as competencies that became liabilities. They sharpened over years of being rewarded for exactly this kind of thinking. 

The problem is that execution doesn't reward this kind of thinking. A leader who only trusts numbers will never see the culture. A leader chasing this quarter's results will never build the coalitions he needs six months from now.

'Execution challenges our leadership skills', Simonska says. And what actually drives execution are things that are, as she puts it, 'very intangible but crucial'. That word, intangible, is deliberate, because intangible means unmeasurable, and unmeasurable means, to the analytically trained mind, unserious. Which is precisely how organizations end up with beautifully constructed strategies and no capacity to execute them.

Why execution fails before it starts

Execution, Simonska contends, fails in the weeks and months before anything is launched, when leaders make (or fail to make) the decisions that will determine everything that follows.

The first failure is diagnostic. Most leaders, when they take a new role or launch a new initiative, don't stop to ask what their organization is actually capable of. Every organization has structural strengths and cultural impossibilities: things it knows how to do well, and things it is constitutionally unable to do, regardless of what the strategy deck says. 'You cannot fight the system', says Simonska, echoing W. Edwards Deming, the management theorist who spent his career arguing that organizational performance is determined by systems, not individuals. Ignoring that reality doesn't make it disappear, it just means the collision comes later, at a higher cost.

The second failure is political. Leaders arrive with a plan when they should have arrived with allies. Execution, at its core, is something a leader orchestrates through networks, coalitions, and carefully built support systems that have to exist before the first initiative is announced. 'You cannot lead the execution unless you are supported by others', Simonska says. 

Without that architecture of influence already in place, even the most technically sound strategy stalls.

First who, then what

Team composition, Simonska argues, is the first decision to ever make. Everything else (the culture work, the coalition building, the process redesign) depends on having the right people in the room when those decisions get made.

The problem? 'Leaders almost always know who on their team isn't working', Simonska explains. They know it early, often earlier than they admit. And they don't act because making a decision requires the willingness to have a hard conversation with someone they see every day. Nvidia's CEO, in a recent interview, made the same point with less diplomacy:

 'It is better an empty chair than a chair with the wrong person'. 

Getting the right people on the bus is only half the work. The other half is knowing which seats actually matter. Simonska calls them key value driving roles. Not the most senior positions, not the most visible ones, but the roles that are directly tied to a company's core competitive advantage: deeply specialized, difficult to replace, taking years to develop. The creative director at a luxury house, the chief engineer at an aerospace firm, the analyst who holds twenty years of institutional knowledge in his head. What makes these roles critical is what happens when the wrong person fills them. 

The performance gap between a low performer and a high performer in these positions, Simonska says, reaches 800% On toxic managers, she doesn't hedge. 'I have a very radical approach', she says. 

'You need to change them. You can't imagine the damage toxic managers make in an organization. There are no half measures'.

Culture is what people do when no one is watching

There is a version of culture that most organizations know well: the offsite, the values workshop, the new set of principles printed on the wall by the elevator. Simonska is not interested in that version. 'Culture is how people behave when they are not observed', she says. And that definition, simple as it sounds, has a radical implication: you cannot change culture by announcing it. You change it by consistently, visibly, and over time changing what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, and what gets punished.

She uses Satya Nadella's transformation of Microsoft as a measure of what real cultural change costs: the shift from 'know it all' to 'learn it all' required dismantling an internal competition culture baked into the company's incentive structures for years. New KPIs, different promotion criteria, and behaviors that had been tolerated at the top suddenly no longer tolerated. That is what transformation looks like from the inside: it is slow, uncomfortable, and deeply personal for everyone involved.

Culture, in most organizations, is everyone's responsibility. Which is another way of saying it's no one's. In Simonska’s opinion, there is only one person responsible for an organization's culture: the CEO. Because of the decisions only a CEO can make: who gets promoted, who gets moved out, which behaviors are rewarded and which are ignored. 

'The culture', she says, 'is the result of the behavior and beliefs of the CEO'. Everything else is downstream of that.  

That view will make some readers uncomfortable, particularly those who have spent years building culture initiatives from the middle. Simonska doesn't soften it. For leaders who don't hold the top seat, that's not an excuse to disengage. You may not own the organization's culture, but you own your team's. And that, Simonska suggests, is where you start.

A view from inside the system

Gregory Tournay didn't come to the Strategy in the C-Suite program with gaps in his résumé. He came with twenty years of operational credibility, a new strategic mandate, and the growing suspicion that the two were not the same thing. The company is over 200 years old, European, mid-sized, in the steel industry, caught between giants, and facing pressures. Tournay's career had been built in the trenches: fixing problems, managing crises, traveling. When he was handed a strategic mandate for the first time (acquisitions, partnerships, long-term positioning), he realized the gap between what he knew and what the situation required was larger than he had anticipated. 

'I needed to refresh my mind', he says, 'not just the concepts, but the way I was thinking.'

And that’s what he found in the Strategy in the C-Suite program at HEC Paris, a shift in perspective. The distinction between business strategy and corporate strategy, which he had always treated as roughly the same thing. The connection between leadership and execution, which he had assumed was obvious, turned out to be the part most practitioners get wrong. 'When I saw that leadership was part of the program', he admits, 'I thought it was just filling a free slot in the agenda'. He was wrong.

The group coaching sessions surprised him most. He arrived skeptical: what could people from unrelated industries possibly contribute to problems specific to a 200-year-old steel company? The answer, it turned out, was a great deal. 

'Even if the members of the group are not part of the same business or the same environment, it was very powerful. It helped us bring some challenges that alone we were unable to reach.'

What made the difference, ultimately, was learning to see the system. Every variable in execution (people, culture, processes, KPIs, structure, decision-making) is connected to every other. Pull one thread and the others move. Change the strategy without changing the people, and the culture absorbs the shock and carries on unchanged. Change the culture without changing the KPIs, and the incentives quietly reassert the old behaviors. 'If you change one parameter in this system,' Simonska concludes, 'you need to adapt all of them.'