The strategy looked flawless on paper. A global consulting firm had produced a 143-slide deck detailing a three-year transformation: market shifts mapped, competitors dissected, operations redesigned, financials projected down to the decimal. The board signed off. The CEO felt confident. The plan was hailed as the company’s future.

Six months later, nothing had changed. The deck sat untouched in a shared drive. Managers had quietly reverted to familiar routines. The company was out $2 million in fees, with no visible progress. “We had a good strategy,” the CEO admitted. “We just couldn’t get enough people to implement it.”

This is not an isolated failure. Research published in Harvard Business Review suggests that roughly two-thirds of well-formulated strategies never deliver their intended results, not because the ideas are flawed, but because execution collapses inside the organization.

Executives often label this an “execution problem,” but the deeper issue is authority. Consultants can diagnose, recommend and persuade, yet they rarely control budgets, staffing or incentives. Their words are advisory, not directive. A consultant saying “reorganize your sales unit” is very different from a leader who can reassign people, approve new roles and tie bonuses to the new structure.

The real breakdown happens in the “messy middle” of the organization. Middle managers, juggling quarterly targets and legacy processes, quietly suffocate new strategies. They delay, de-prioritize or simply outwait the consultants. When external advisors leave, the old playbook returns.

To close this execution gap, some investors and companies have shifted from relying on external strategists to installing embedded operators: leaders with line authority, long-term mandates and compensation tied to performance. These embedded executives can approve capital expenditures, move headcount, enforce new processes and stay with the organization long enough to see the strategy through resistance, setbacks and course corrections.

The work they do is rarely glamorous. It involves sitting through budget reviews, challenging assumptions, insisting on new planning disciplines and following up relentlessly until new behaviors stick. But unlike consultants, they have both the power and the incentive to push change through institutional inertia.

Many CEOs resist this model because embedded operators can threaten existing power structures. Hiring one is an admission that the current team cannot execute alone. Yet without someone in the room who is not just advising but deciding, even the smartest strategy is likely to die in a folder.

Most strategic plans do not fail in the boardroom. They fail because no one with real authority stays long enough, and pushes hard enough, to make them real.