The Strategy That Had to Die
Felipe Bovolon
Director Strategy& (PwC) | IESE MBA | ITA Engineer | Practitioner of Genuine Strategy
Chapter 1: The Body in the Boardroom
The strategy was deader than last quarter's revenue projections.
It lay there on the mahogany conference table, its PowerPoint slides already starting to decompose into meaningless bullet points. I'd seen a lot of dead strategies in my time. Twenty-three years on the corporate homicide beat teaches you to recognize the smell of murdered innovation from three conference rooms away. This one had that particular stench of death by a thousand budget cuts.
Detective Peter Porter, that's me. I solve the murders nobody wants to admit happened.
"Time of death?" I asked, though I could already see the lividity in its financial projections.
"Approximately three months ago," said Tom from Internal Audit, sweating like a CFO in an SEC investigation. "Though nobody noticed until this morning's board meeting when the CEO tried to reference it and... well..." He gestured at the corpse with the kind of nervous twitch you see in middle managers who've just realized their department's on the chopping block.
I approached the body, my wingtips clicking on Italian marble that cost more than most people's salaries. The strategy lay sprawled across the table like a Vegas showgirl after a three-day bender, except less dignified. Its five core choices were still visible, like the chalk outline at a crime scene:
Beautiful. Integrated. Dead as disco.
"Who found the stiff?" My fingers traced the edge of a dusty implementation roadmap. Three hundred pages of Gantt charts that nobody had looked at since the launch party. The strategy's burial shroud.
"I did," said CFO Margaret Holworth. She had the kind of voice that could freeze a budget at fifty paces and hands that trembled like quarterly earnings after a product recall. "I came in early to prepare for the board meeting. Started pulling up our strategic initiatives to show progress, and... there was nothing. Just this shell. The words were there but the life was gone. Like finding your spouse after they've been having an affair with prudent fiscal management."
I pulled out my notebook. Analog, like my soul. In this business, you learn that digital evidence has a way of getting "reallocated" when the C-suite gets nervous.
"I'll need to interview everyone who touched this strategy in the last six months," I said. "And I mean everyone. From the CEO down to the kid who makes coffee in the innovation lab."
Tom cleared his throat like a man about to confess to expensing personal lunches. "Detective Porter, you should know... this is the third strategy to die in this company in five years. Same M.O. Big launch that'd make a Hollywood premiere jealous, champagne toasts, company-wide emails with more exclamation points than a teenager's text messages. Then... nothing. Like they never existed. Like Jimmy Hoffa, but with worse PowerPoint skills."
A serial killer. The worst kind, the kind that made organizations afraid to ever really choose again, like a divorcé scared of commitment.
Chapter 2: The Lineup of Suspects
I assembled them in the boardroom at 2 PM sharp. Seven suspects, seven potential killers, arranged around their victim like mourners at a funeral where everyone's secretly relieved the bastard's finally dead.
The afternoon sun sliced through the blinds like accusations, casting film noir shadows across faces that had seen too many restructurings and not enough sunlight.
"Let's get one thing straight," I said, lighting a metaphorical cigarette with the flame of their burning strategic plans. "You all had access to this strategy. You all touched it. Hell, your fingerprints are all over the murder weapon: Last quarter's budget reallocations. The question is: Who delivered the killing blow?"
THE CEO - Richard Sterling: Sat at the head of the table like a mob boss at a family meeting, his $5,000 Armani trying to cover the flop sweat of a man who'd promised the board 30% growth. The strategy had been his baby, conceived in the back seat of a management consultant's PowerPoint presentation and born in an Aspen retreat that cost more than most people's houses.
"I loved this strategy," he said, but his eyes darted to the window like a perp looking for an exit. "It was going to transform us. Make us the Uber of insurance. The Netflix of risk management. The..."
"Then why did you stop mentioning it in earnings calls after Q2?" I cut him off before he could compare his company to another tech unicorn. "Why did it disappear from your vocabulary faster than 'synergy' after the consultants left?"
Sterling's jaw tightened like a compensation clawback clause. "The analysts didn't understand it. They wanted to see immediate returns. I had to... adjust the narrative. You know how it is, Detective. Sometimes you have to manage expectations."
Yeah, I knew how it was. Managing expectations was corporate speak for lying through your teeth while your strategy bled out in a back alley.
THE CFO - Margaret Holworth: Still trembling from finding the body, but I caught something else underneath the shock. Relief, like a widow at the reading of a life insurance policy.
"The numbers never worked," she admitted, clutching her laptop like a rosary made of Excel spreadsheets. "The capability investments alone would have destroyed our EBITDA for three years. Three years! The street would have crucified us. Our share price would've dropped faster than employee morale after a layoff announcement."
"So you strangled the budget?" I suggested, watching her face for tells.
"I... reallocated resources to protect shareholder value." She said it with the practiced ease of someone who'd justified a thousand small murders. "Death by a thousand cuts to the discretionary spending."
I made a note: Financial asphyxiation. Classic CFO move.
THE COO - James Park: Leaned back in his chair, arms crossed like a bouncer at an exclusive club where innovation wasn't on the guest list. Twenty-year company man with the operational scars to prove it.
"This strategy was designed by people who've never run an operation in their lives," he growled, each word dripping with the contempt of a man who'd seen consultants come and go like seasonal allergies. "Agile pods? In a 50-year-old insurance company? My middle managers would have revolted faster than French peasants with pitchforks. We run this place on procedures that were old when Elvis died."
"So you let it die?" I pressed.
"I didn't let it die, Detective. I just... didn't perform CPR. There's a difference."
Sure there was. Like the difference between murder and manslaughter. Academic, when you're the corpse.
THE CMO - Aisha Patel: Young, brilliant, hired six months ago specifically to execute the digital transformation. Now she looked like she'd aged five years for every month on the job. Marketing years were like dog years, but worse.
"I tried," she whispered, the words falling out like shell casings from a gun that had run out of ammunition. "God, I tried. But every campaign I launched got vetoed for being 'too risky.' Every innovation got watered down until it looked exactly like what we'd always done, just with a new font. It was like trying to perform surgery with a butter knife while the patient insisted they were fine."
"Who did the vetoing?" I asked, though I already knew the answer. In corporations, everyone had veto power but nobody had approval authority.
Aisha's eyes flicked around the table like a snitch in a room full of made men. "Everyone. Legal was concerned. Compliance had issues. Sales said it would confuse the channel. IT said the systems couldn't support it. It was death by a thousand committees."
THE HEAD OF SALES - Bob Morrison: Twenty-year veteran, top producer, the kind of guy who still kept a Rolodex and thought LinkedIn was for kids. He had the comfortable bulk of a man who'd eaten a lot of steak dinners with clients and the demeanor of a pitbull protecting its bone.
"My team sells through relationships," he growled, making 'relationships' sound like a weapon. "This 'no human agents' bullshit would have destroyed everything I've built. My guys have kids in college, alimony payments, boat loans. You want me to tell them they're being replaced by a chatbot? That's not transformation, Detective. That's assassination."
I wrote: Motive: Existential threat. Would kill to protect his commission structure.
THE CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER - Kevin Liu: The strategy's supposed champion, hired six months ago from a fintech startup to drive transformation. He sat unnaturally still, like a man who'd realized he'd brought a smartphone to a fax fight.
"I came here to build the future," he said carefully, each word measured like he was testifying before Congress. "But I discovered the organization wasn't ready. The antibodies were too strong. Sometimes the patient needs to stabilize before surgery."
"Or the surgeon loses his nerve when he sees what he's really operating on," I observed.
Kevin's eye twitched like a broken KPI dashboard. "You don't understand, Detective. Trying to transform this place was like trying to teach a dinosaur to tap dance. Technically possible, but everyone gets hurt in the process."
THE HEAD OF STRATEGIC PLANNING - Diana Walsh: The keeper of process, the creator of PowerPoints, the high priestess of the Gantt chart temple. She had the satisfied look of someone whose frameworks always survived even when strategies died.
"I documented everything," she said, gesturing to a stack of binders that could crush a small innovation. "Every workstream, every milestone, every dependency. The implementation plan was flawless. Three hundred and forty-seven slides of pure strategic excellence."
I picked up a binder. It weighed more than my divorce settlement. Hundreds of pages of process pornography, charts, and matrices that would make a dominatrix jealous. Perfect process. No progress.
"A beautiful cage," I murmured. "Tell me, Diana, how does a strategy breathe under all this structure?"
"Structure enables execution," she replied with the certainty of someone who'd never executed anything but a PowerPoint transition.
The room fell silent like a quarterly earnings call after missing guidance. Seven suspects. Seven motives. Seven alibis that all sounded like corporate buzzwords.
Chapter 3: The Conspiracy
"Here's what I think," I said, standing slowly, my knees creaking like a legacy IT system. "This wasn't a murder. It was an assassination. Planned. Coordinated. Each of you played a part, like a corporate Ocean's Eleven, except instead of robbing a casino, you robbed this company of its future."
Sterling started to object, but I raised a hand that had signed too many case closure reports on dead strategies.
"The CEO who stopped championing it publicly, like a mob boss denying he knows his own hitman. The CFO who starved it of resources, cutting off its blood supply one budget line at a time. The COO who let it die in implementation, watching it suffocate under the weight of existing processes. The CMO whose innovations got vetoed into vanilla. The sales head who protected his turf like a warlord. The CDO who lost his nerve when he saw the size of the beast. The planner who buried it in process until it couldn't move."
I paused, studying their faces. They had the look of people who'd just realized they were all having the same affair.
"But here's the thing about conspiracies: They require a mastermind. Someone who orchestrated this death so carefully that everyone else thought they were just protecting their own interests. Someone who made murder look like middle management."
The temperature in the room dropped faster than headcount after a merger announcement.
Finally, Kevin Liu raised his hand like a schoolboy who'd figured out that the teacher was the killer.
"Detective Porter," he said quietly. "What if... what if the strategy killed itself?"
Chapter 4: The Revelation
"Explain," I said, though I was already starting to see it. In this business, the victim is sometimes the perpetrator.
Kevin stood, walked to the whiteboard. Started drawing. "Look at what this strategy was asking for. Transform a 50-year-old insurance company into a tech startup. Fire the entire sales force. Rebuild every system. Change the culture. All while maintaining quarterly earnings."
"It was designed to die," Aisha added, the revelation hitting her like a performance review. "The requirements were impossible. Like asking someone to perform brain surgery on themselves while running a marathon."
"The perfect suicide," I muttered. "Make yourself so impossible to implement that death is the only option."
Sterling's mask finally cracked like shareholder confidence after a data breach. "You want to know the truth, Detective? We all knew. Deep down, we all knew this strategy couldn't work. But we needed it to exist. For the board. For the analysts. For the employees who still believe in transformation."
"So you create these beautiful strategies," I interjected, "knowing they'll die. You manage their entire lifecycle... Birth, brief life, inevitable death... Like a corporate hospice worker."
"Every three to five years," James added, "we need a new story. So we hire consultants, craft visions, make PowerPoints. We launch with fanfare. And then we slowly, carefully, professionally manage its death. No fingerprints. No smoking guns. Just a strategy that gradually fades away like employee enthusiasm after the holiday party."
I looked at them all. Seven killers who were also seven victims. Seven people trapped in a system designed to murder the very changes it claimed to want.
"The Monday morning meetings," I said. It wasn't a question.
They all looked at each other. Guilty as middle managers padding expense reports.
"That's where it really happens," Margaret admitted. "Not in the official forums. In the meetings that aren't on any calendar. Where the real company runs. Where we decide what lives and what dies without ever saying it out loud."
"Those meetings," Sterling said, "aren't conspiracies. They're... antibodies. The corporate immune system protecting itself from change. We don't plot murder, Detective. We just... manage reality."
Chapter 5: The Truth
I closed my notebook. In twenty-three years of investigating corporate homicides, I'd never encountered a murder where everyone was guilty and no one was responsible. It was like finding out the butler did it, and the maid, and the colonel, and the victim had loaded the gun.
"You know what the real crime is?" I said. "It's not that you killed this strategy. It's that you'll do it again. In two years, maybe three, you'll hire new Aishas and Kevins. You'll craft another beautiful strategy. You'll launch it with champagne and hope. And you'll murder it just as carefully as you murdered this one."
Sterling nodded with the resignation of a man who'd accepted his life sentence. "The next one's already in development. Digital transformation is getting stale. We're moving to 'AI-driven ecosystem innovation.' The consultants are already sharpening their PowerPoints."
"And you'll all play your parts," I continued. "The CEO who gradually stops mentioning it. The CFO who finds it unaffordable. The COO who deems it impractical. The CMO whose innovations get vetoed. The sales head protecting his turf. The transformation officer who loses nerve. The planner who buries it in process."
I gathered my things. Notebook, pen, the weight of another unsolvable case.
"No crime has been committed here. At least, none I can prosecute. You've created the perfect murder, where the victim volunteers for death, the killers believe they're healers, and the weapon is the very culture that claims to want change."
As I reached the door, Sterling called out with the desperation of a man asking for absolution from a priest who'd lost his faith.
"Detective Porter. What would you do? If you were us?"
I turned back, gave them the only truth I had left.
"The only thing that could break this cycle. Make a real choice. One where the opposite isn't stupid. One that might fail. One that makes you nervous. One that keeps you up at night like a guilty conscience. But that would require admitting you've been choosing the comfort of slow death over the discomfort of possible life."
I looked at each of them, these corporate murderers who were also corporate victims.
" Roger Martin has been explaining this for decades. Strategy requires choice. Real choice. The kind that closes off options and commits resources, and might be wrong. But you've perfected the art of strategic theater. All the motion of choice with none of the commitment. You've turned strategy into a three-act play where everyone knows the ending before the curtain rises."
The door clicked shut behind me with the finality of an annual report.
Epilogue: The Next Corpse
Two years later, my phone rang at 3 AM. Another corporate strategy found dead. Different company, same story. Like film noir, it was always the same movie with different actors.
The caller mentioned they'd already assembled the usual suspects: CEO, CFO, COO, CMO, transformation officers, planners. The gang's all here. The band's back together. The murder club had reconvened.
"Save yourself the trip," I said, pouring whiskey that burned less than the truth. "I'll tell you exactly what happened. You launched a bold strategy with more fanfare than a royal wedding. Everyone applauded like trained seals. Slowly, carefully, collectively, you strangled it in meetings that don't appear on any calendar. Nobody's fingerprints are on it because everybody's fingerprints are on it. The real killer is the comfort of the status quo, and you're all accessories after the fact."
"Then what do we do?" the caller asked with the desperation of a man who'd just realized he was both victim and criminal.
"Stop hiring detectives to investigate murders you're committing. Start making actual choices. The kind where the opposite isn't stupid. The kind that might fail. The kind that make you physically uncomfortable, like wearing a wool suit in August or telling the truth in a quarterly earnings call."
I hung up and made a note in my file: Case #247. Death by Strategic Theater. No charges filed. Perpetrators remain at large. Murder weapon: PowerPoint and cowardice.
Outside my window, the city hummed with the sound of business as usual. In conference rooms across the city, new strategies were being born. Fresh-faced, full of promise, blissfully unaware they were already being fitted for coffins.
The perfect crime. Repeated endlessly. In plain sight.
And somewhere, Roger Martin was probably writing another article explaining what real strategy is, knowing full well it would be quoted in the very PowerPoints that would murder the next one.
I poured another whiskey. In this business, you either laugh or you drink.
I chose both.