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The Strategy Was Right: Why Good Strategies Fail Before They Reach Reality
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 1 2026
Pages: 108
Weight: 0.34
Height: 0.22 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Most strategies that fail were not wrong.
They were approved by leadership. Supported by data. Backed by investment. Launched with enthusiasm.
Yet they still failed.
Why?
Because strategy rarely fails when it is designed.
It fails while it is travelling.
Every strategy begins as an intention.
It must then survive a journey through organisational layers, competing priorities, local realities, resource constraints, incentive structures, and human behaviour before it can become reality.
Most organisations focus on the quality of the strategy itself.
Few pay enough attention to the difficulty of the journey.
Drawing on more than twenty years of experience leading strategy execution, transformation programmes, and multi-country operations across Africa, Dounya Boughambouz introduces Strategic Distance(TM) - a practical framework for understanding why good strategies often stall between approval and adoption.
The greater the distance a strategy must travel before it changes behaviour in the real world, the harder that journey becomes.
And many organisations are not designed to carry strategy across that distance.
In this book, you will discover:
- Why strategy approval marks the beginning of the hardest part - not the end
- Why programmes can be delivered successfully and still fail to become adopted
- How Strategic Distance(TM) and Organisational Gravity(TM) influence strategic outcomes
- Why strategy senders think in years while strategy receivers survive in quarters
- How governance structures create visibility without necessarily creating decisions
- Why trust is execution infrastructure in complex organisations
- How to identify where a strategy is in its journey: Aligned, Translated, Deployed, Adopted, or Results
- Practical tools to diagnose execution risk before initiatives begin to stall
The Strategy Was Right is written for CEOs, Chief Strategy Officers, Transformation Leaders, PMO Directors, and executives responsible for turning ambition into reality.
If you have ever approved a strategy that failed to deliver, funded a transformation that struggled to gain traction, or wondered why organisations repeatedly fail to execute their most important priorities, this book will give you a new language for understanding what happens between strategic intent and operational reality.
Because many strategies do not fail because they were wrong.
They fail because they never arrive.
The strategy was right.
The distance won.
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