Full Effort. Flat Results. What If You're Solving the Wrong Problem?
The Gap Where Performance Goes to Die
Full effort. Flat results.
Your team isn't lazy. They're whiplashed.
And nobody's saying it out loud.
Not to you, anyway.
Because here's what actually happens inside organizations when results go flat: the direction shifts. Then shifts again. A new priority lands. A new voice gets in the leader's ear. Another pivot. Another "this is the year we finally..." And the team — talented, capable, genuinely trying — keeps absorbing it. Adjusting. Re-adjusting. Running hard on a track that keeps moving underneath them.
Meanwhile the leader is crystal clear. It's so obvious. Why isn't anyone coming along?
The gap between those two realities is where performance goes to die. And most leaders never look there. They look at the team.
What if the problem isn't who you think it is?
PMI's 2025 research asked senior executives what's actually blocking business reinvention. Not technology. Not capital. Not talent. The top barrier to reinvention, cited by 35% of executives, is the disconnect between planning and execution.
ZoomInfo puts the cost of that gap at $2 trillion annually. 63% of strategy value organizations plan for never materializes.
Two trillion dollars of effort. Just not aimed at the right thing.
The CEO thinks everyone's aligned. The VP of Sales and the VP of Ops are building completely different strategies. Partner agreements get signed and nobody can explain how they'll actually drive revenue. Everyone's moving. Nothing's landing.
And the default move? Look at the team. Restructure. Rethink who's in the seats.
Wrong diagnosis. Expensive mistake.
What does the right diagnosis actually look like?
Two examples. Both from the technology space. Both recent.
The first. A managed service provider came to me with a high-stakes RFP. Finance and consumer identity technology. Two entrenched competitors. Their technical solution was genuinely strong. Their team knew exactly how to deliver.
But their messaging fell flat. They couldn't clearly articulate why they were the better answer. The value proposition was buried in technical language that didn't connect to what the buyer was actually trying to solve.
Not an execution failure. A strategy clarity failure.
We sharpened the positioning. Reframed the differentiation around buyer priorities. Coached the pitch. Same team. Same solution. Different strategy.
Multi-year. $12 million contract.
The second is happening right now, this week.
A technology company asked me to build a GTM plan for a new wraparound service offering. Great concept. Real energy. Good people who believed in it.
Except when I dug in, what they had wasn't a tested delivery model. It was a theory built around a single client engagement, driven by an embedded advocate coaching the implementation from the inside. One lens. One context. Assumptions that had never been stress-tested outside that one controlled situation.
They were ready to go sell it.
You know what that looks like in your world? It's shipping software before UAT. All the UX mapped out. Demo polished. Sales deck ready. Launch date set.
Not a single user acceptance test run.
You don't ship before UAT. You don't go to market before your delivery model can hold weight outside a single friendly pilot. The assumptions have to be stress-tested before they become your customer's problem.
Two meetings. Executive briefing. Working session on actual delivery process. Strawman SOP to surface the failure points before they became real ones.
That's the foundation. Build it first and the GTM does exactly what leadership envisioned. Skip it and you're selling a promise you can't keep.
"You can't sell what hasn't been designed to deliver. The cart doesn't go before the horse just because you're excited about the cart."
So how do you know which problem you're actually dealing with?
Harvard Business Review reports 67% of strategies fail. Kaplan and Norton put unsuccessful execution closer to 90%. Those numbers persist because most organizations never stop to ask the one question that would tell them why.
Is this a strategy problem — or an execution problem?
From the outside they look identical. Both produce flat performance. Both produce missed deadlines. Both make you want to look at the team.
Here's a fast way to tell the difference:
It's probably a strategy problem if:
Your team is working hard but not on the right things
Priorities keep shifting because nothing is producing traction
Everyone nodded at the plan but can't explain why it will work
More effort isn't closing the gap between input and output
It's probably an execution problem if:
The strategy is clear but the work isn't happening
Owners aren't owning. Deadlines are suggestions. Accountability lives in decks, not reality.
You know exactly what needs to happen — it's just not happening
Handoffs keep breaking down and no one will say where
The most dangerous version isn't a broken team. It's a capable, motivated, hard-working team running fast in the wrong direction. Strategy problem. Execution costume.
And the only way to see it clearly is from outside the building.
Why does the strategy-execution gap matter more right now?
The MSP Global State of MSP Report, Summer 2025 is direct: price pressure and commoditization are the biggest threats to MSP business models today.
When your services are being commoditized, you have no margin for executing the wrong strategy. Or for going to market before your delivery model is ready to hold weight.
AI is reshaping buyer expectations. Partner ecosystems are getting more complex. The window between "great concept" and "someone else got there cleaner" gets shorter every quarter.
Speed matters. But speed in the wrong direction is just expensive.
Are you willing to have the real conversation?
Not the one where everyone manages optics. The one where someone asks the uncomfortable question and actually waits for an honest answer.
What's actually generating results right now…and why?
Where is work stalling…and what's actually causing it?
What changed in the last 60 days that your strategy hasn't accounted for?
What would you stop doing if politics weren't a factor?
When did you last get an honest answer from someone with nothing to lose by giving it?
Those aren't rhetorical. They're diagnostic. And the answers almost always point somewhere leaders aren't looking.
The clarity problem is rarely just one person's. It lives in the space between the leadership team, that gap in what's assumed to be aligned but is never actually tested out loud.
Not a people problem. Not an effort problem. A clarity problem.
You can't see it from the inside. That's not an insult. It's just physics.
Ready to find out which problem you actually have?
Not every leader needs this. But if you're running full effort against flat results and can't name exactly why, this is where you start.
The 60-Day Strategic Reset Playbook is the diagnostic framework I put in front of leadership teams on day one. It’s the hard questions, in the right order, with space to be ruthlessly honest about what's actually happening.
No consultant-speak. No framework theater. Just clarity.
I'll be at GTIA's Genius Café in Chicago starting March 9th — working with technology leaders on culture, transformation, and what it actually takes to move an organization forward. If you'll be there, find me. If you're not — but this stung a little — let's talk.
