Thriving in the age of revolution requires a lot more than simply squeezing a bit more wealth out of yesterday's strategies. Executives must search for signs of diminishing returns in their efficiency programs, for evidence of unsustainable revenue growth, for creeping strategy convergence. A brutal honesty about strategy decay, and a commitment to creating new wealth are the new foundations for strategy innovation. Executives and employees in every company have a set of little lies they tell themselves to avoid having to deal with the reality of a faltering strategy. Strategy is the easy part.
Implementation is the hard part.
Strategy is easy only if you're content to have a strategy that is a derivative of someone else's strategy. But strategy is anything but easy if the goal is to be the author of industry transformation. Top management should decide which ideas are worth investing in. In most large companies someone with a vision of a radical new business model has to go to the defenders of the old business model to get funding. All too often the guy running the old thing has veto power over the new thing.