Why partial strategy execution is worse than no strategy at all

‍Key Takeaway: Most strategies fail not because they were wrong, but because only a small slice of the organization ever genuinely executes them. Donald Sull's research at MIT Sloan, based on surveys of 7,600 managers across 262 companies, found that even when middle managers are given five chances to list their company's top five strategic priorities, only 55% can name even one of them. The share plummets to 16% among frontline supervisors and team leaders, the people closest to the actual work. Kaplan and Norton's earlier research found similar gaps: at one major Mobil division, only 20% of employees understood the strategy before a Balanced Scorecard rollout. McKinsey's 2024-2025 strategy survey of executives shows the situation getting worse, not better, with only 21% of executives reporting their strategies pass the basic quality bar (down from 35% in 2010). If your OKR rollout has stalled at the leadership layer, your strategy has stalled with it. The cost isn't just that 80% of execution is missing. It’s also that the 20% of execution you do have is unsupported, miscoordinated, and quietly being undermined by the rest of the org. Rolling out tools like OKR and Perdoo to the entire company isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between strategy that runs the business and strategy that decorates the boardroom.

Most companies don't have a strategy execution problem in the way they think they do.

What they have is a strategy understanding problem, on a scale that's genuinely shocking once you see the numbers. Strategy doesn't fail because the strategy was wrong. It fails because the strategy never made it past the top floor.

I want to walk you through what the research actually shows, because the data here is stronger than most leadership teams realize, and the implications for how you roll out OKR (and a tool like Perdoo) are direct. This is also why we've argued that strategy comes first, OKR second: without a clear strategy that everyone can articulate, you're using OKRs to operationalize a vacuum.

The Sull finding: only 55% of middle managers can name one strategic priority

The cleanest piece of research on this comes from Donald Sull and his colleagues at MIT Sloan. Over more than five years, they surveyed 7,600 managers across 262 companies in 30 industries. The survey was specifically designed to test how well strategy was actually understood inside organizations, not just whether leadership said the strategy was clear.

The headline finding, published in Harvard Business Review in 2015, is uncomfortable. Sull's team asked managers to list their company's top 5 strategic priorities. They didn't have to get them in order. They didn't have to phrase them perfectly. They just had to name them. They were given 5 chances.

The authors put it bluntly: "Only 55% of the middle managers we have surveyed can name even one of their company's top five priorities. In other words, when the leaders charged with explaining strategy to the troops are given five chances to list their company's strategic objectives, nearly half fail to get even one right."

It gets worse as you go down the org chart. The same study found that "fewer than one-third of senior executives' direct reports clearly understand the connections between corporate priorities, and the share plummets to 16% for frontline supervisors and team leaders."

Read those numbers again. The managers in the survey were not random employees. They were named by the CEO as the people responsible for executing the strategy. Given 5 attempts, nearly half of middle managers couldn't name a single one of the company's top 5 priorities. Less than a third of senior executives' direct reports understood how their work connected to those priorities. Among frontline supervisors and team leaders, the people closest to the actual work, only 16% understood the connections.

Sull's team is direct about how leadership reacts when they see this data: "Senior executives are often shocked to see how poorly their company's strategy is understood throughout the organization."

The Kaplan and Norton finding: 20% of employees understand the strategy

Sull's research is the most recent large-sample study, but it's confirming a pattern that Robert Kaplan and David Norton documented decades earlier in their work on the Balanced Scorecard. In The Strategy-Focused Organization (2000), they describe the Mobil North America Marketing and Refining transformation. Before the Balanced Scorecard rollout in 1994, annual employee surveys showed that only 20% of the workforce understood Mobil's strategy. By 1998, after a structured effort to align the entire organization to the strategy, awareness had risen to 80%.

The two interesting things about Mobil's number aren't the before or after. They're: (1) Mobil was already a sophisticated company with a clear strategy, and only 1 in 5 employees understood it; (2) the gap closed only when leadership explicitly built a system to translate strategy into measurable, owned objectives for every team.

That's not a coincidence. It's the central finding across decades of strategy execution research. Strategy doesn't propagate by itself. It propagates only when the organization actively builds the system to make it propagate. Without that system, the default state is the Sull finding: most managers don't know the strategy, and most frontline supervisors don't see how their work connects to it.

The McKinsey finding: the situation is getting worse

If you assumed that 30 years of management thinking on strategy execution would have improved the picture, the most recent research disagrees.

McKinsey's 2024-2025 strategy survey asked executives whether their strategies passed 4 or more of McKinsey's Ten Tests of Strategy. These are basic quality checks: is the strategy real, is it specific enough to act on, does it allocate resources, does it confront the actual competitive reality, and so on.

In 2010, 35% of executives said their strategies passed 4 or more of the tests. In 2024-2025, that number had dropped to 21%. That's a 40% decline in basic strategy quality, in the same window where the business environment got more complex and the cost of misalignment got higher.

McKinsey's interpretation: companies are getting worse at strategy not because they're trying less, but because complexity has outrun the management systems they're using to handle it. The strategy decks keep getting longer. The execution stays at the top.

What partial execution actually looks like

Here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough. When a strategy is understood by 100% of the leadership team and only 20% of the rest of the company, the result isn't "the strategy gets 20% executed." It's something worse.

When the leadership team is executing and the rest of the org isn't, three things happen, and all three are quietly destructive.

Cross-team work breaks at the seams

‍Teams that have OKRs are measuring outcomes. Teams that don't are still measuring activities. When those teams need to collaborate (which is almost always, in any non-trivial company), the two sides are speaking different languages. The team with OKRs is asking "what's the result we're trying to produce together?" The team without is asking "what's on my plate this week?" The work gets done, slowly, with friction, and nobody can tell why everything seems to take longer than it should.

The strategy can't self-correct

A strategy that's running through the whole organization produces information. Each team's check-ins, each Key Result that lands at 0.4, each KPI that drifts off target — all of that is data the leadership team can use to adjust the strategy in flight. When 80% of the company is operating outside the OKR system, that data simply doesn't exist. The leadership team is flying with the instruments of the executive suite turned on and the instruments of the rest of the airplane turned off. They can't tell if the strategy is working until the year is over and revenue tells them.

The story the leadership team is telling itself gets less and less true

‍This is the most insidious one. Because the leadership team is the part of the org genuinely executing the strategy, they see daily evidence that "the strategy is working." Meanwhile, the rest of the company is running on the same patterns it ran on before the strategy was set. By month 6, leadership believes the company is aligned around the new direction. The rest of the company hasn't actually changed direction at all. Sull's research documented this directly: the leaders running the strategy are routinely the most surprised when they finally see the data on how poorly it's understood lower down the org chart. We've covered the deeper version of this disconnect in why OKR programs fail: when leadership stops experiencing what the rest of the company experiences, the program drifts.

Why this isn't a comms problem

The most common response to these numbers is to assume the issue is communication. If only 16% of frontline supervisors understand the corporate strategy, the obvious answer is to communicate more. More all-hands. More emails from the CEO. Posters in the kitchen.

Sull's research directly tested this hypothesis, and the answer is: communication volume is not the problem. In the survey, nearly 90% of middle managers said top leaders communicate the strategy frequently enough. When managers were asked why the strategy wasn't well understood, communication clarity wasn't even the top complaint. The top complaint was that the company had too many strategic priorities and initiatives stacked on top of each other, making it impossible to know what actually mattered most.

The deeper issue is structural. Communication tells people what the strategy is. It doesn't tell them how their team's work translates that strategy into action this quarter. That translation is what's missing in most companies. And translation isn't a comms problem. It's a goal-setting problem.

This is exactly the gap a well-designed OKR system is built to close. Every team's Objectives translate the corporate strategy into the specific changes that team is driving this cycle. Every Key Result is the team's commitment to a measurable outcome. Every check-in is the team telling itself, and leadership, whether the work is connecting to the result. Without that system, communication just becomes noise that the org learns to tune out.

What changes when the whole company is in

There's also research on what happens when the gap closes. The Sull team identified, across 69 different factors they tested in their survey, the single strongest predictor of strategic alignment: how consistently managers at every level explained their team's goals in terms of both the team's mission and the company's strategy.

That's it. The single biggest lever in their data wasn't strategy clarity at the top. It wasn't communication frequency. It wasn't even strategy quality. It was the discipline, at every layer of the company, of every manager being able to say: here's what we're working on, here's why it matters to our team, here's how it connects to the company strategy.

When that discipline is in place across the entire organization, alignment improves dramatically. When it's only in place at the top, alignment stays low no matter how many all-hands you run.

The Kaplan and Norton work points to the same conclusion. The Mobil division didn't move from 20% to 80% understanding by communicating harder. They moved by building a system that required every team to translate the corporate strategy into their own measurable objectives, then made those objectives visible to everyone else.

That's the bar. Not "leadership has OKRs." Not "the pilot team has OKRs." Every team. Same system. Same cadence. Same visibility.

The bar to hit

"Company-wide" doesn't necessarily mean every employee writes individual OKRs from day one. That's overreach in most companies and creates more administrative cost than value. The actual bar to hit is simpler, and it follows directly from the research.

Every team has at least one Objective that explicitly ties to a Strategic Pillar or a Company OKR. Not a department-level Objective that nobody owns. A team-level Objective with a name attached. The basic mechanics of how to set OKRs with your team apply here, but the discipline has to be the same for every team in the company.

Every employee can name their team's current Objectives. Not memorize them. Articulate them in their own words.

Every employee can name the company's current top priorities. Sull's 55% number is the floor you need to climb above. If your number isn't well over 80%, your rollout isn't complete.

Every team runs the same check-in cadence on the same rhythm. Weekly, bi-weekly, whatever you've chosen, but the same across the company. Cadence is what builds the muscle.

The strategy is visible to everyone, by default. This is where a tool like Perdoo (or any equivalent system of record) earns its keep. If knowing the strategy requires asking your manager who asked their VP who asked their EVP, the system has failed before it started.

If you hit those five things, you've crossed the line from "leadership has a strategy" to "the company is executing a strategy." Below that bar, you have a leadership exercise. Above it, you have a company.

The cost of staying partial

Most companies don't realize how expensive partial execution actually is. Here's where I think the dollar and time costs really are, based on what the research implies plus what we see across customer rollouts.

You burn a year. Most strategies are 2 to 3-year horizons. When the first year is spent with only the top layer of the company genuinely executing, you're 33-50% of the way through the strategic window before the rest of the org even starts. By the time everyone is aligned, the market has moved.

You hire to compensate. A common pattern: the strategy isn't moving fast enough, so leadership concludes they need more senior talent. They hire VPs, restructure functions, bring in consultants. None of it addresses the actual issue, which is that the strategy never made it past the executive suite. The new hires walk into the same broken translation problem.

You blame the wrong thing at the end of the year. The strategy didn't work, so leadership concludes the strategy was wrong. They go back to the drawing board, build a new strategy, communicate it widely, and pilot the OKRs again with the leadership team. The cycle restarts. The actual problem (that the rest of the company was never brought into execution) never gets named.

McKinsey's data on the declining quality of corporate strategies is consistent with this pattern. Strategies are getting worse over time, not because the people writing them are getting worse, but because the systems that should be testing strategies through real execution data are absent in most companies. Bad strategies survive because the org has no way to find out they're bad until it's too late.

What to do this week

If you're reading this and your OKR rollout has been quietly stuck at "leadership and one pilot team" for several months, here's the concrete step.

Audit your rollout. What percentage of teams have current Objectives, not stale ones from 6 months ago? What percentage of employees can name their team's Objectives without looking them up? What percentage can name the company's top 3 strategic priorities?

If your numbers are anything like the industry baseline (and they probably are), the answer is significantly worse than you think. Sull's 16% number for frontline supervisors is the baseline. If your rollout hasn't moved you well above that, your rollout hasn't actually rolled out.

Then put a date on the company-wide expansion. Not "soon." Not "next quarter." A specific date, with a name, communicated publicly. The executive sponsor's name on the document. We've written about how to make this transition without losing momentum, and the 90-day plan to go from pilot to company-wide is its own playbook.

The hardest thing about strategy execution isn't writing the strategy. It's making the decision to bring the whole organization into executing it. Most companies never make that decision explicitly. They drift past it, leaving the strategy as a leadership artifact and wondering, a year later, why nothing changed.

Don't drift past the decision. Make it on purpose. Our 5 stages of OKR maturity framework calls the place where most companies stall "stuck at Piloting," and the fix is exactly the explicit, dated, named commitment described above.

How Perdoo helps you go company-wide

The research shows the bar that has to be cleared: every team translating the strategy into measurable Objectives, every employee able to name their team's priorities and the company's priorities, every team running the same cadence on the same rhythm, all of it visible by default. Perdoo is built specifically to make that bar reachable without a heroic effort from the OKR Champion. The product gives every team a structured place to write their Objectives with explicit parent links to a Strategic Pillar, KPI, or Company OKR, so the translation Sull's research identifies as the biggest lever happens by design rather than by accident. Every employee can see the strategy and how their work connects to it, the moment they log in. If you want to go from "strategy lives at the top" to "the company is executing the strategy," start for free or request a demo.