Making Strategy Real | Evan Campbell

A strategy can look flawless on a slide deck and still fail the moment it reaches the real world. I’m joined by Evan Campbell, technology executive, former management consultant, and author of Adapt to Win, to unpack why organisations with “good strategy” so often struggle with strategy execution, strategic alignment, and making day-to-day work match leadership intent.

We get practical about what breaks: strategy decay as clarity gets lost down the hierarchy, the inertia of an organisation already in motion, and the false comfort of performative rollout activity. Evan explains why OKRs only deliver focus, alignment, and accountability when they are built with a genuine bottom-up contribution, not pushed downhill like old-school MBOs. We also separate the work into three capabilities you can actually improve: strategy development, strategy deployment, and strategy execution, including the controls and feedback loops that stop teams from discovering failure at the end of the quarter.

From there, we move into lean portfolio management and investment decisions. If you cannot kill projects, you cannot be adaptive. We talk zombie projects, budget defensiveness, and why portfolio managers often default to ROI and NPV because it feels “objective”, even when it quietly starves innovation. The thread running through everything is trade-offs and accountability: executives must be clear about what not to do, give teams decision rights, and shorten the loop between decisions and consequences.

If you want strategy to survive contact with reality, this conversation will give you a sharper lens and a few uncomfortable questions to ask on Monday. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review with the biggest execution problem you see in your organisation.

Find Evan's work here: 
Adapt to Win: https://adapttowin.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evcampbell/

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🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast

📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality

Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/