For years I told people I was going to write a book. I meant it every time I said it. I had the idea, I knew roughly what I wanted to say, and I had a vague sense that at some point life would settle down enough for me to sit down and do it.

It never settled down. Between leading multiple businesses, family life, travel and my kids’ schedules, there was always a reason to push it further down the list, and every one of those reasons was completely legitimate. That is what made it so easy. Nobody ever has to defend a decision they never consciously made.

What eventually changed had nothing to do with finding more time or wanting it more than I had wanted it the year before. I set a deadline. I put money into working with a publisher, which meant something real was now committed to a thing that had only ever been an intention. And I told the people around me what I was doing, because I knew that would make it harder to quietly let it slide.

After that I was writing four or five nights most weeks, heading to the gym somewhere between eight and ten at night because I did not want to give up time with my boys and I did not want to give up exercising. So I wrote while walking on the treadmill. I thought through chapters on the StairMaster. Between sets I revised paragraphs or answered emails from the publisher. Some nights it amounted to one paragraph.

None of that was inspiring and none of it felt like progress at the time. What made it work was that the resources had already moved. The money was spent, the deadline existed, and people were going to ask me about it.

Strategy is not a thinking problem

Most leaders treat strategy as something you work out. You get the right people in a room, you argue about where the market is going, you decide on a direction, and you write it down. Then you communicate it well and repeat it often enough that it sticks.

That work matters, but it is not the part that fails. The part that fails is much less interesting and much harder to talk about, which is whether anything actually moves afterward. And there is data on how rarely it does.

Read that again with your own organization in mind. These are large companies with real strategy functions, professional planning cycles and enormous incentives to get this right. And the single best predictor of what any part of the business received this year was what it received last year.

Why last year always wins

The reason is not stupidity and it is not a lack of conviction. It is that every existing allocation has a person attached to it, and that person will make a reasonable case for why their share should not shrink.

They are usually right on the facts. The work is real, the team is real, the commitments are real, and cutting it would cost something visible. Meanwhile the new priority has no team yet, no track record, and no advocate with the standing to fight for it. So the argument is not even close, and it resolves the same way every year without anyone deciding to keep things as they are.

The same thing happens to individuals, which is why the book sat undone for so long. Everything already in my week had a reason for being there. The book had nothing except my intention, and intention loses that argument every single time.

What moving actually looks like

A strategy has become real when you can point to something that used to receive attention and no longer does. Not something you stopped talking about. Something you stopped funding, staffing, or spending your own hours on.

If you cannot name what got smaller, nothing has changed yet. You have added an aspiration to a system that was already full, and the system will absorb it the way it absorbs everything else, by quietly giving it whatever is left over after the existing commitments are satisfied.

This is uncomfortable to apply honestly, because it means a strategy is not a statement of what matters most to you. It is a statement about what you were willing to take something away from.

The part nobody enjoys

Reallocating means telling somebody competent, who is doing good work, that their share is going down so that something less proven can have a chance. That conversation is genuinely unpleasant and there is no version of it that feels good.

Which is exactly why the McKinsey finding looks the way it does. It is not that executives failed to notice their portfolios were frozen. It is that unfreezing one costs something personal, every single time, and the cost of leaving it alone is invisible and arrives years later. Given that trade, most people leave it alone, including during a crisis that should have forced their hand.

The leaders who compound advantage over a decade are mostly just the ones who were willing to have that conversation more often than their competitors were.

Where this actually lands

The book got written between sets at a gym at nine at night, which is not the story anyone wants to hear about how vision turns into action. There was no moment of clarity and no surge of motivation that carried it through.

What there was, was a set of commitments made early that took the decision out of my hands on the nights I did not feel like it. That is the whole mechanism, and it works the same way for a company as it does for a person.

You do not have a strategy because you chose one. You have a strategy when something you used to fund is getting less, and the thing you said mattered is getting more.