Every failed company had a strategy.
I want to start there because the consulting industry has built a very profitable business on the premise that the reason companies fail is that they had the wrong strategy, and the solution is a better one. Sometimes that is true. More often it is not.
Strategy is the easy part. You can hire someone to give you a strategy. You can read a book and have a strategy by Tuesday. Strategy is information, and information is available to everyone. The constraint is almost never the plan.
The constraint is character.
Character is what determines whether the plan gets executed when it is hard. When the market shifts and the plan needs to change but changing it means admitting you were wrong. When the key person leaves and the plan has to be rebuilt around a gap. When the revenue drops and the plan requires cutting something you do not want to cut. When you are tired and the plan requires one more difficult conversation you do not have the energy for.
Strategy tells you what to do. Character determines whether you actually do it.
This is why I am more interested in the formation of leaders than in the strategy of companies. A well-formed leader with a mediocre strategy will outperform a poorly-formed leader with an excellent one, because the well-formed leader will execute, adjust, and hold the standard under pressure, and the poorly-formed leader will not.
The plan is easy. The plan is always easy. The plan is the part that looks good in the deck and sounds right in the meeting and makes everyone feel like the hard work is done.
The hard work has not started yet. The hard work starts the first morning the plan meets the real, and the real does not cooperate.
That morning is not a strategy problem. That morning is a character problem. And character was built, or not built, long before that morning arrived.