When strategy lives in one head

I've watched this pattern repeat itself for years. Strategy settles in comfortable places. In the founder's mind, it finds excellent company. Past experiences, hard-won intuition, strong convictions, ideas that connect easily. Everything feels coherent there. Alive. Protected from friction.

The difficulty is that what feels clear inside one person's head rarely survives intact once it enters an organisation.

And sometimes, the consequences are expensive.

When expansion meets reality

Years ago, I worked with a premium FMCG brand expanding across Europe. The product was strong. Margins were healthy. The founder knew exactly what the strategy was: expand the product range, replicate the success of the home market, use monthly promotional cycles to force new listings and build shelf presence.

On paper, logical. In practice, a strategy built on conditions that didn't exist.

The home market had been cultivated over years. Sales agents were everywhere, visiting independent retailers weekly. The brand was strong enough that shop owners would take chances on new products. Promotional windows were flexible. Shelf space could be negotiated incrementally.

Europe was different.

The brand was less established. Retail was dominated by centralised chains with rigid listing windows. Sales coverage was thin. The brand didn't have the weight to demand shelf expansion the way it could at home.

But the strategy didn't account for that.

The directive came down: unify commercial policy across all markets. Monthly promotional plans on new product lines to drive listings. The same approach that had built the business at home, scaled across ten countries.

The founder's logic was sound. This strategy had turned a good product into a category leader in the home market. The promotional cycles created momentum, forced retailer attention, built shelf presence incrementally. There was no reason, in principle, why it shouldn't work elsewhere.

Except that the conditions which made it work didn't exist yet in most of Europe.

I was Head of Marketing and Sales Europe at the time. The country managers pushed back immediately. They knew the infrastructure wasn't there.

My role became translating that gap. Not as criticism, but as reality: what worked at home and why, what was different in Europe, where the mismatch sat. Making that visible, making it discussable, turned out to be harder than any of us anticipated.

So we navigated. The imperative was revenue targets at all costs. When country managers were asked about promotions and new listings, they were evasive. But the revenue numbers came in, and nobody complained too loudly.

Underneath, though, something else was happening.

The numbers that told the truth

The brand had an enormous product catalogue. Over 350 individual SKUs. But only 15 to 20 had meaningful rotation. These were the hero products. The original innovations that had built the brand. Listed almost everywhere, they generated 55 to 60 percent of total revenue.

Everything that came after was derivative. Well distributed in the home market, where the sales infrastructure could support incremental shelf expansion. Almost invisible across Europe.

The country managers understood this instinctively. They couldn't expand the range the way the strategy demanded. The centralised chains wouldn't give them more shelf space. The independent retailers who might take a risk were too few to move the needle.

So they did what made sense locally: concentrated all promotional pressure on the hero products. The ones that actually sold.

New listings happened, technically. The numbers looked fine on paper. But the new products sat on shelves in marginal independents with no rotation. Meanwhile, the hero products were being hammered with discounts month after month to hit revenue targets.

For a year, this worked. Or seemed to.

Then the company introduced tighter financial controls. For the first time, someone started monitoring average selling price by SKU across markets.

That's when the truth came out.

The hero products had seen their average selling prices collapse. In some cases, discounts had pushed prices down by more than 25 percent. The new products were listed, sure. But they weren't moving. Dead weight on the catalogue.

The strategy had been clear in the founder's head: expand range, use promotions to build presence, replicate home market success.

What actually happened: margins eroded on the products that mattered, new products went nowhere, and the organisation spent a year optimising for the wrong thing.

The correction that made it worse

The following year, the directive changed. Restore average selling prices on hero products. No more promotional pressure.

In practice: no discounts for a year. Not to build margins. Not to reposition. Just stop.

The country managers saw the disaster coming. So did I. In markets where promotional cycles had become the norm, where retailers expected regular discounts and customers had been trained to wait for them, pulling back meant one thing: slower sales.

Which is exactly what happened.

Now we were caught. Revenue targets remained impossibly high. Profitability needed to improve. And we had no tools to achieve either.

The solution I found wasn't elegant, but it worked because it acknowledged the constraints instead of fighting them.

I restructured the contracts with the major chains, not by demanding different terms but by reframing how we deployed the same budget. Most of the promotional spend had been classified as trade discounts, listed directly on invoices. I shifted part of that budget into marketing investments instead.

Same money. Different application.

Instead of discounting products to drive volume, we bought visibility. Feature placements in weekly flyers. In-store displays. Shelf talkers. We gave retailers free display units for new products, letting them test rotation before committing to permanent listings they saw as risky.

The logic was simple: if the brand wasn't strong enough to demand shelf space, we had to make it less risky for retailers to give it to us. If promotional pressure on hero products was eroding margins, we had to find other ways to create movement.

It didn't unlock the growth the original strategy had imagined. But over two years, it stopped the bleeding. Most of the catalogue moved back into positive territory. Hero product margins stabilised. Some of the new listings even gained traction, though nothing approached the originals.

More importantly, the country managers stopped navigating around the strategy and started working with it. Because now the strategy acknowledged what was actually true in their markets.

What actually went wrong

This wasn't a story about bad execution or incompetent teams. The country managers weren't lazy. The founder wasn't wrong. The product was good.

The problem was structural, and I've seen it repeat itself in every organisation that's gone through rapid growth.

Strategy gets built in the context where it succeeds. The people who built that success carry all of that context in their heads. It's not written down because it doesn't need to be. It's obvious. Intuitive. Coherent.

But when that strategy moves into new contexts, all of that accumulated intuition stays behind. What transfers is the directive. The plan. The desired outcome.

What doesn't transfer is why certain choices were made, what trade-offs were acceptable, which principles were non-negotiable and which were pragmatic adaptations to specific constraints.

In this case, the strategy had been built in a market with dense sales coverage, flexible retail relationships, and strong brand equity. When applied to markets with centralised chains, weaker positioning, and rigid listing windows, it collided with a reality nobody had fully articulated yet.

None of this was secret information. The country managers knew it. I knew it. But the strategy wasn't a shared framework where those realities could be integrated. It was a directive. And directives don't invite contradiction.

So the organisation adapted in the only way it could: by doing what made sense locally while reporting what looked good centrally. The country managers concentrated promotions on hero products because that's what moved. New listings happened on paper because that's what was measured. Revenue targets were hit because that's what mattered.

Until someone looked underneath and saw what it had cost.

Why strategy stays implicit

None of this happens because founders are unwilling to share control, or because teams lack ownership.

It happens because strategy, when left implicit, tends to remain where it feels most comfortable. In the founder's head, surrounded by familiar context and coherent logic.

The founder isn't withholding information. The founder genuinely believes the strategy is clear. And in their head, it is.

The problem is that clarity doesn't survive the transfer. What moves into the organisation is the conclusion, not the reasoning. The directive, not the diagnosis. The plan, not the principles.

And as long as strategy stays there, protected from friction, it cannot do the work it's supposed to do inside an organisation.

Strategy only starts to matter when it leaves that comfortable space. When it's articulated clearly enough to be questioned. When it's exposed to contradiction, to local reality, to the people who actually have to make it work.

Until then, organisations compensate. Plans multiply. Metrics get gamed. Escalations increase. Founders carry more decisions than they should. Teams navigate around obstacles instead of solving them.

And strategy, while very much present, remains oddly unusable.

Making strategy survive contact with reality

Externalising strategy isn't just about writing it down.

A strategy document in a slide deck is still implicit. So is a vision statement on the wall. Even a detailed plan, if it doesn't account for the specific contexts where decisions get made.

What makes strategy explicit is when it becomes a shared language for decision-making. When a country manager facing a trade-off between margin and volume knows what the organisation values more. When a pricing decision doesn't require escalation because the framework is clear. When local reality can challenge central assumptions without it feeling like insubordination.

In that European expansion, the strategy became usable only when I stopped trying to enforce a unified policy and started building decision frameworks around what was actually true in each market. Centralised chains required different approaches than independents. Weak brand positioning required different investments than strong positioning. Revenue growth and margin protection couldn't both be maximised simultaneously without extraordinary financial effort.

These weren't revelations. They were realities the country managers had understood from the beginning. But they couldn't act on them because the strategy didn't make room for them.

The moment it did, the organisation stopped fighting itself.

The test

If you're wondering whether your strategy is truly shared, here's a simple test.

Pull three people from your organisation who execute daily decisions. Not leadership. People in the field, in the market, on the ground.

Describe a realistic trade-off: "A major retailer wants exclusivity, but it conflicts with our existing distributor. What do we do?"

If they give you three different answers, or they look uncertain, your strategy isn't shared. It's a conviction you hold, but it hasn't been translated into a framework others can use.

The uncomfortable truth is that most strategies fail this test.

Not because the strategy is bad. But because it was never made explicit enough to survive contact with reality.

And reality, as it turns out, has a vote.