Most companies think they fail at strategy because they chose the wrong one. But that's rarely true. What kills good strategies isn't dramatic failures of foresight. It's the slow asphyxiation by a thousand meetings, the death by consensus, and the fiction that all parts of the organization are equally important.

The pattern is predictable: Leadership invests months crafting an elegant strategy. They communicate it thoroughly, ensuring widespread understanding. Employees can recite the vision and goals perfectly. Yet when concrete decisions need to be made, momentum dissipates. Recently, I spoke with a CEO who sighed, "I've presented our strategy seven times in three months, why don't I see more action?" While his employees could recite the strategy flawlessly, conversations with mid-level staff revealed complete decision paralysis. This points to something crucial: memorizing the five key bullet points of a strategy isn't sufficient - people need to grasp the underlying tradeoffs.

Strategy isn't about saying yes to good ideas. It's about saying no to good ideas. But in most companies, saying no requires both clear data and significant political capital - two things most middle managers lack. Without hard numbers to justify their choices and the influence to push back on peers, they inevitably defer decisions upward, schedule more meetings, and wait for consensus that never comes.

Most companies try to solve strategy execution through process, but that's exactly wrong. The standard corporate response - layering on more meetings, approvals, and stakeholder reviews - tends to worsen the problem. When universal agreement becomes the standard, mediocrity often follows.

The solution isn't increased oversight - it's more clarity about tradeoffs. Rather than broad statements like, "we're focusing on key markets," teams need to know exactly how many more marketing dollars they can spend in priority markets versus others. Instead of general preferences like "we prefer to build in-house for core capabilities," they need to know whether a 40% cost premium for internal development is acceptable.

While this might appear straightforward, it's surprisingly uncommon. Many executives resist being specific, fearing it will box them in. But the risk of committing to the wrong tradeoff pales against the cost of perpetual ambiguity. The key is making your tradeoffs explicit: Yes, we'll accept 30% lower margins in emerging markets for the next 18 months. Yes, we'll pay that 25% premium for internal development in core areas. No, we won't delay launches chasing feature parity. When teams have this level of clarity, decisions flow naturally throughout the organization.

Effective strategies don't achieve theoretical perfection. They provide enough specificity for people to execute without constant permission-seeking. In practice, this means replacing vague principles with concrete tradeoffs. It means accepting that some people will disagree with those tradeoffs. And most importantly, it means trusting teams to make local decisions within clear boundaries.

This approach demands both courage and clarity from leadership. Yet the alternative is always worse: watching a promising strategy gradually crumble under the weight of countless small indecisions. In startups, this death happens quickly. In large companies, it can take years. But the outcome is the same: inaction disguised as prudence, and failure disguised as consensus.