"We have an execution problem" is one of the most common, and least specific, diagnoses in a revenue organisation. It's worth being precise about what execution actually is, because the vagueness is doing a lot of quiet damage.
A working definition
Strategy is a set of choices about where to focus and what to deprioritise.
Execution is the sum of thousands of small, distributed decisions, made by people who never read the strategy document, that either move toward those choices or drift away from them.
The strategy can be exactly right and execution can still fail, because execution isn't a single decision made once at the top. It's a property of the system that produces daily decisions everywhere else.
Where the gap actually opens
Three places strategy quietly dies
- Translation. The strategy never becomes a specific, local decision rule for the people closest to the customer.
- Incentive mismatch. The metrics people are actually measured on reward a different behaviour than the strategy implies.
- Feedback lag. By the time anyone notices execution has drifted from strategy, months of compounding decisions have already gone the other way.
Why "more accountability" rarely fixes it
The instinctive fix is to push harder on accountability: more reviews, more dashboards, more pressure. That treats execution as a motivation problem. Most of the time it's a clarity and feedback problem: people are making reasonable decisions given the information and incentives actually in front of them, which just happen not to match the strategy.
If you change nothing except how hard you push, you'll get more effort pointed in the same, slightly wrong, direction.
A more useful question
Instead of asking "why isn't the team executing the strategy," it's more productive to ask: what would someone closest to the customer need to know, be measured on, and get feedback on, for their day-to-day decisions to naturally add up to this strategy?
That question usually surfaces the translation, incentive or feedback problem directly, and it's a much more tractable thing to fix than "execution" in the abstract.