October 1, 2013, was supposed to be a historic day.

Healthcare.gov would open its digital doors and allow millions of Americans to enroll in affordable health plans.

The policy was law. The demand was real. The deadline was immovable.

The site went live.

And it crashed almost immediately.

In 2007, Nokia controlled more than 40 percent of the global mobile phone market. Their devices were everywhere. They were profitable, admired, and dominant.

But just six years later, Nokia sold its entire phone business to Microsoft for a fraction of its former value.

What makes Nokia’s collapse so painful is this: they saw the future coming.

In early 2019, WeWork was one of the most talked-about companies in the world.

It was valued at $47 billion. Investors lined up for an IPO that was imminent. It felt unstoppable.

And then it all came crashing down.

Within months, confidence evaporated, the narrative unraveled, and the valuation collapsed with stunning speed.

It launched with nearly $2 billion in funding. It was backed by some of the most powerful names in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

And there’s a good chance you barely remember it.

That’s the first clue.

In just six months, the company burned through its capital and shut down, becoming the fastest $2 billion failure in entertainment history.

This is the story of Quibi.

It was marketed as the ultimate luxury music experience. Supermodels on yachts. Private jets. Tickets selling for thousands—some packages over $200,000.

But when guests arrived, the reality was a nightmare. A rainstorm had soaked the site. The "luxury villas" were actually disaster relief tents, and the mattresses inside were piled up, soaking wet. The gourmet meals were cheese sandwiches in Styrofoam boxes.

In April 1846, the Donner and Reed families set out for California with one north star: arrive safely before winter.

A clear, simple goal—one that required steady progress and smart decisions along the way. But when they started falling behind schedule, they reached for a shortcut. And that’s when everything began to unravel.

In 2013, Target stormed into Canada with the confidence you’d expect from one of America’s most beloved retailers. They opened more than 100 stores in a single year.

Canadians were eager. Surveys showed 52% were excited about the launch.

But when the doors opened, the dream collapsed. Shelves were half-empty. Prices felt higher than promised. On opening day, some stores even hung signs out front that read: "We're open (mostly)."

For eighteen months, Ford built the suspense.

The Edsel would be revolutionary—the car of the future. Dealers clamored for allocation. Customers waited to see what Ford had been hiding.

Then, in September 1957, the curtain lifted.

Within three years, the Edsel was dead, leaving losses that totaled more than $2 billion in today’s dollars.

We humans aren’t good at taking in lots of completely new information. Metaphors lighten the load and speed up clarity. They pin new ideas to something people already understand so they can act on them faster.

Alignment isn’t everyone nodding in agreement. You can’t determine alignment with a yes or no question. Alignment runs too deep for that.

True alignment is when everyone making the same decision when you’re not in the room.

When alignment isn’t real, the cracks show up fast.

The Problem: Scoreboards don’t create clarity

A target tells you what outcome you want, but not what you must become or improve to achieve it.

Yes, teams can act on “grow revenue.” But those actions will fragment—each group doing what makes sense in their lane. One team discounts. Another raises prices. Marketing adds promos. Ops tightens costs.

Everyone’s rowing, but not in the same direction.

Scroll LinkedIn long enough and you’ll see the usual suspects:

• Posts claiming Steve Jobs didn’t believe in market research.

• That Netflix beat Blockbuster because they had more vision.

• That Kodak went bankrupt because it ignored digital photography. 

They make for great click bait. Visionaries as heroes, analysts as villains. The punchline is always the same: one bold idea is all it takes. What’s missing is the part that actually determines who wins — execution.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Push too hard in one direction, and nature pushes back. Forests catch fire. Rivers overflow. Ecosystems collapse. Balance is nature's resilience.

The same is true in business. When strategy gets lopsided, progress in one area can come at the unintended expense of another.

Inside organizations, we get excited about clever concepts and breakthrough plans. But even brilliant strategy—without full commitment—can fall flat. A great idea, half-executed, just looks dumb. Or worse, confusing.

Strategy isn’t self-fulfilling. It needs people to bring it to life with clarity, precision, and energy. Everyone playing their part. Everyone on tempo. Everyone believing it’s worth doing right.

“Reasoning is biased in favor of the reasoner.”

David McRaney dropped that gem in How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, and it’s one of those lines that just won’t leave me alone. It’s clever, sure. But it also nails something fundamentally true about how humans think—and why we’re better off thinking together.

When we reason on our own, our brains aren’t wired for objectivity. They’re wired for advocacy. We argue for our own perspectives with built-in bias and barely notice we’re doing it. 

Our brains are also lazy. Or, to be more charitable, efficient. Reasoning takes effort. So we delegate that cognitive load to others. It’s why the best thinking happens in groups—especially diverse groups—where we can distribute the mental workload, challenge each other’s assumptions, and sharpen each other’s thinking.

Do you remember The Dress controversy?

Back in 2015 a washed-out photo of a striped dress split the web: half the planet saw blue-black, the rest swore it was white-gold.

I recently came across an article that explained why so many of us conclusively saw something so different. Scientists found two key drivers: (1) the photo was low quality, forcing our brain’s visual system to “repair” missing data, and (2) people’s repairs depended on the light they were used to. Regular daylight dwellers mentally subtracted bluish light and perceived white-gold; night owls tended to discount yellowish bulbs and landed on blue-black. The real split was experience-driven guesswork by the predictive brain, which constantly fills gaps with prior knowledge to keep perception running smoothly. 

That same shortcut shows up whenever leaders drop a half-lit strategy note.

Did you know the word priority was only ever used in the singular form for hundreds of years?

It entered the English language in the 1400s and meant the very first thing—the one item that came before all others. And for the next 500 years, that’s how it stayed. Singular. Clear. Undeniable.

Then somewhere in the 20th century, we started saying “priorities.” Plural.

As if by declaring five things “most important,” we could bend time and energy to our will. It’s like claiming there were multiple winners in a race. Everyone gets a trophy, right? But that’s not how performance works. Not in competition. Not in strategy. Real focus doesn’t allow for handing out participation ribbons. It means hard choices. It declares a winner. It says: this comes first.

Clarity is the difference between strategy that moves and strategy that stalls. If your team doesn’t “get” the strategy, you have no chance of executing it. Yet, clarity doesn’t happen by accident. It requires discipline: cutting through ambiguity, prioritizing what matters most, and ensuring that every person understands not just the what, but the why behind the strategy.

Simon Sinek famously calls on us to “start with why.” But for strategy to truly stick, we also need to explain “why me?”

People commit when they see how their work matters—when the strategy doesn’t just make sense, but feels personal. That’s when execution takes off.

And behavioral science backs this up.

Every organization wrestles with the challenge of implementing new strategies while keeping the current business running. Teams are already fully engaged in their “day jobs”—what’s often referred to as business as usual (BAU) or run-the-business (RTB) work. This tension between sustaining current operations and pursuing strategic change is one of the most common pitfalls in execution.

While it’s essential to continue delivering results for the existing business, the truth is the status quo isn’t enough. If it were, we wouldn’t need a new strategy. Something isn’t working—whether it’s a current problem or an emerging challenge—and change is necessary. But change doesn’t magically happen in the margins of an already packed calendar. To succeed, we have to intentionally make room for it.