Strategy is broken...

Time after time, it’s the same story.

An ambitious strategy is formulated by executives in the boardroom.

It’s neatly packaged into a beautiful PowerPoint and shared with the wider organization.

Everyone is excited and clinks champagne glasses. Job done…right?

Fast forward several months later…and nothing has really changed. The initial excitement about the strategy has fizzled out. People have gone right back to the same grind as before.

A sense of inevitable loss fills in the air. Loss of time, energy, money, morale and credibility. Maybe next year will be different?...

This is the near-universal truth of how strategy ‘works’ in organizations. Big or small, everyone has experienced it.

Why does this always happen? Your strategy gave you a pathway, but very quickly, you lost sight of that pathway and reverted to form. Simply put, there is an enormous gulf between the strategic plan and real-world execution.

Let's solve this.

We need to bridges that gap with visibility, dynamic and adaptive plans, agile iterations and a relentless focus on what actually matters.

We need to bring inclusivity, teamwork, and give ownership and meaning to every person in the organization.

I truly believe in creating a world of opportunities where companies and economies grow. But also where people can create, innovate, and take deep meaning and satisfaction in their work.

In this bi-weekly newsletter, I am hoping to go through some of the best, good and ugly strategies we have seen, the best ways to approach strategy, and how important it is to focus on the strategy execution rather than the planning. This is where most of companies get stuck.

For this first edition, I want to share with you how not to do strategy.

“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.” Warren Buffett

Mistakes are inevitable. We all make them - in life and in business.?The trick is to learn from them and not repeat them.

Fortunately for us (and unfortunately for them), many huge companies have many very costly mistakes.

It would be almost foolish not to learn from them, right?

At Cascade, we gathered a selection of strategic blunders that can teach us valuable lessons. We focused on mistakes that we think could’ve been avoided and explain how.

This can serve you as a stress reliever. ??

Whenever you make a mistake you can take a look at it and quickly discover that what you did is probably minuscule compared to some of the biggest missteps in business history. And putting things into perspective makes it much easier to learn from the mistakes.

As you’ll see most, but not all of the examples, ended in failure. However, there is an important distinction between “making a mistake” and “failing.” A failure is the result of the wrong action, whereas a mistake is a wrong action.

Why is that important? A mistake doesn’t necessarily result in failure. It can be fixed. That’s important to keep in mind when you make one.

Now, let’s take a look at how McDonald’s managed to create unhealthy salads, why Sony was afraid to invent the iPod and many more head-scratching cases.

Here you go: https://www.cascade.app/downloads/21-worst-strategies

Enjoy and let me know,

Karim