From Strategy to Execution: Building Roadmaps That Actually Work

Every company has a strategy deck. Far fewer have teams who can tell you how their daily work connects to what's in it.

After over 20 years leading strategic initiatives across consumer electronics, integrated resorts, and education, the gap I've seen most consistently isn't between good strategy and bad strategy. It's between strategy that stays in a presentation and strategy that actually gets built into how an organisation operates.

Making Strategy Relevant Where It Has to Work

At Samsung Asia, I worked with local market Presidents, the Regional CEO & Senior Heads as well as HQ to translate global strategy into operational roadmaps across Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Oceania. The challenge wasn't understanding corporate vision or brand guideline, it was making it relevant in markets as diverse as cities such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh and Manila.

What looked like a clean strategic direction from HQ often carried assumptions that didn't hold in specific markets: about consumer behaviour, channel dynamics, price sensitivity, competitive intensity. Strategy formulation became an ongoing exercise in knowing which parts of the global brief were non-negotiable and which parts needed to be rebuilt from local reality up.

The honest version of this: strategy isn't what you plan at headquarters. It's what you enable in the field.

What Execution Actually Required

When we drove the large-screen phone category to market leadership, success came from connecting consumer insight, channel distribution, pricing, marketing to go-to-market execution. We did not simply identify an opportunity; we built the operational blueprint to capture it - connecting consumer insight to channel distribution, pricing architecture and go-to-market execution in a way that was coherent across markets and teams.

Effective strategy formulation requires three disciplines:

First, ensure to ground your strategy in market reality. Use data, competitive intelligence, and consumer insights, not assumptions. During my time at GfK Asia, I learned that great strategy starts with understanding what's actually happening in your market, not what you hope is happening. (e.g. spending time at the retail stores and speaking to the sales promoters). This includes knowing the interaction between the retail/channel and the customers.

Second, be ready to design for execution from day one. At NUS Business School, leading growth strategy for the MSc portfolio meant partnering with academic directors, faculty and various teams (e.g. career services) to ensure market positioning aligned with programme delivery capabilities and how it should look like in stages. Operational excellence is fundamental for feasibility and success of a strategy.

Third, to build accountability into the strategy itself. Define clear ownership, measurable outcomes and decision rights. When the membership size base grew in RWS, it wasn't through better targeting alone. It was through dashboards and close monitoring, communication (hearing from the ground) and accountability that drove focus and performance transparency across teams.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The best strategists I've worked with share one quality that's harder to teach than analytical ability: they think about implementation while they're still designing the strategy. They ask "who owns this, and can they actually deliver it?" before the plan is finished, not after it's been approved.

Strategy formulation is ultimately the work of closing the distance between ambition and execution and that distance is rarely closed by better slides.

FiveNinetyFive