Evan Campbell: Your Strategy Is Decaying... Here's How to Save It

On this episode, I speak to Evan Campbell, technology executive, strategy consultant and author of Adapt to Win. Evan is a former CTO, product development leader and US Army Green Beret who's spent years helping organisations become more effective, competitive and adaptable. We dig into why corporate strategies so often fail to survive contact with reality, how to turn strategic ambition into meaningful action, and why organisations need to get better at adapting rather than blindly following the plan.

Episode Highlights

We cover a lot, including:

• A great strategy is worthless if you can't execute it. Organisations can spend millions developing impressive strategies that never translate into meaningful action. A good-enough strategy executed well can outperform a brilliant strategy that never makes it off the PowerPoint slides.

• Strategy naturally decays unless you actively maintain it. Organisational inertia, competing priorities and everyday distractions gradually erode strategic clarity. Leaders need to continually reinforce strategic intent and check whether people are still pulling in the same direction.

• If your strategy doesn't involve difficult trade-offs, it's probably not a strategy. Vague ambitions and superficial executive alignment let everyone carry on with their favourite projects. Real strategy requires explicit choices about where to compete, how to win and, crucially, what not to do.

• OKRs aren't a magic fix for organisational dysfunction. Simply relabelling existing goals as OKRs won't change anything, and tying them to individual rewards encourages sandbagging and gaming the numbers. Their real value comes from creating shared direction, cross-functional alignment and genuine ownership.

• Your actual strategy is revealed by where you spend your money. Forget the strategic presentations and corporate messaging. The initiatives receiving funding and the activities consuming people's time reveal what the organisation is really prioritising, whether intentionally or not.

• Obsessing over ROI can kill innovation. Traditional financial prioritisation favours predictable, short-term returns over uncertain opportunities for growth. Organisations need different ways to assess different types of investment, or they'll systematically starve the initiatives that could secure their future.

• Project-based funding encourages waste and discourages adaptation. Funding large initiatives upfront creates pressure to deliver everything originally promised, even when the remaining work adds little value. Incremental investment, continuous evaluation and the willingness to stop work can deliver better overall returns.

• Functional silos can actively undermine the company's strategy. Teams optimising for their own goals can end up working against one another, even when everyone has good intentions. Strategic alignment requires coherent decisions across the entire operating model, not just agreement between product and engineering.

• Leaders should communicate intent, not micromanage execution. Command-and-control management creates slow decisions and prevents people closest to the work from responding to reality. Effective leadership provides clear objectives while giving teams the autonomy and capability to decide how to achieve them.

• Strategy should be treated as a hypothesis, not a prediction. Strategic planning feels comfortable because organisations can control their plans, but customers and markets ultimately determine whether a strategy works. The most adaptable organisations continuously test their assumptions, learn from outcomes and change direction when the evidence demands it.

Connect with Evan Campbell

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evcampbell/
• Website: https://adapttowin.co/

Work with Me

Through One Knight Consulting, I help product companies build better products and stronger product teams. If you're a business leader and would like to chat about how I can help you, email me at hello@oneknightconsulting.com or book a free advisory call here: https://okip.link/advice