The problem was never the strategy. It was never the market. It was never the timing. In most cases of sustained underperformance, the root cause sits in the seam between strategic intent and operational reality — unmeasured, unnamed, and funded in the wrong direction.
The Seam No One Measures
Ask a CFO where operating income is at risk and they'll point to margin compression, FX exposure, cost structures. Ask a COO and they'll gesture toward supply chain volatility or vendor concentration. Ask a CEO and you'll hear something about macro headwinds or competitive pressure.
Almost no one will say: "Our execution is the risk."
And yet, on average, 29% of operating income is at risk not because of what's happening in the market — but because of what's happening in the seams. The gap between decision and action. The handoff that never quite lands. The ownership that's nominally assigned but not genuinely held. The follow-through that quietly dies between the leadership offsite and Monday morning.
This is execution risk. And it is the most expensive blind spot in business today.
"Almost no one will say: 'Our execution is the risk.' And yet 29% of operating income is at risk not because of the market — but because of what's happening in the seams."
The Consultant Industrial Complex Got This Wrong
For decades, the prescribed solution to underperformance has been more analysis. More frameworks. More workshops. Bring in a firm, run a diagnostic, produce a report, present to the board, and let the organisation absorb the findings over the next eighteen months.
The result? A beautifully documented picture of a problem that has already compounded.
Traditional risk management was built for financial exposure, regulatory liability, and operational hazard. It was not built for the invisible tax that bad execution levies on every initiative, every quarter, every year.
There is no line item for "decisions that didn't get made cleanly."
No ledger entry for "accountability that diffused across three teams."
No balance sheet entry for "the clarity that never arrived."
But the costs are absolutely real — and they compound every quarter they go unmeasured.
What Execution Risk Actually Looks Like
It doesn't announce itself. That's what makes it so dangerous.
It looks like a strategic priority that everyone agrees on in the room and no one owns when the room empties. It looks like a leadership team that is nominally aligned but operating from different assumptions about what the business is actually trying to do. It looks like new hires who are six months in and still unable to access the knowledge they need to perform the role they were hired for.
NAVETRA™ measures execution risk across ten domains. When exposure clusters across them simultaneously, the compounding effect on operating income is not linear. It's geometric. Most organisations have no visibility into how they score across any of them.
The Metric That Changes the Conversation
Here's what shifts when you frame execution risk in financial terms: it stops being a culture conversation and becomes a capital allocation decision.
OIaR is the translation layer executives have been missing. It answers the question every CFO and CEO should be asking but rarely has the data to ask well: "What is our current execution posture actually costing us — and what is it worth to close the gap?"
When the answer is 29 cents of every operating dollar, the conversation in the boardroom changes. It's no longer about whether to invest in execution capability. It's about whether you can afford not to.
Speed Is the Other Advantage You're Leaving on the Table
The argument against taking execution risk seriously has always been practical: to measure it properly, you need months of data gathering, cross-functional interviews, ERP and HRIS pulls, and a team to synthesise it all. By the time the picture is clear, the problem has evolved.
That argument no longer holds.
When a leadership team can do this in minutes, the question is no longer "can we afford the time to look at this?" The question becomes: "Why haven't we looked yet?"
The Uncomfortable Truth for Executives
The organisations with the highest execution risk are rarely the ones in crisis. They're the ones performing well enough to avoid scrutiny — just not well enough to unlock the next level.
The ones where the gap between strategic ambition and operational reality is treated as normal friction rather than quantifiable, addressable risk.
The uncomfortable question for any C-suite is not whether execution risk exists in your organisation. It does. The question is whether you're measuring it — or funding workarounds for it without knowing that's what you're doing.
That response itself — "we have this handled" — is a risk signal worth examining.
What Purple Wins
At NAVETRA™, we built around a single conviction: execution risk is the most undermanaged lever in the enterprise. Not because leaders don't care about execution — they do. But because until now, there has been no fast, rigorous, financially-framed way to see it clearly.
The organisations that will outperform over the next decade won't be the ones with better strategies. They'll be the ones that close the seam between strategy and delivery faster, more precisely, and more repeatably than their competitors.
Purple — the convergence of strategic intent and operational follow-through — is where the win actually happens.
The scan takes minutes. The insight it surfaces could redirect millions.
Execution risk that isn't measured doesn't disappear. It accumulates — funded by the wrong line items, named as something else, and recognised too late to limit the damage.
Sources & Methodological Notes
The analysis, frameworks, and claims presented in this article are based on Purple Wins' proprietary NAVETRA™ research methodology, benchmarked against peer-reviewed and practitioner literature on execution risk, organisational performance, and strategic delivery. The following references underpin the key assertions made in this piece.
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Mankins, M. & Steele, R. — "Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance", Harvard Business Review (July–August 2005).
Foundational research establishing that companies typically realise only 60–63% of their strategies' potential financial performance, with the gap attributable primarily to execution failure rather than strategic planning quality. Underpins the core framing of execution as the primary performance lever and basis for the strategy-delivery seam concept.
hbr.org/2005/07/turning-great-strategy-into-great-performance -
Sull, D., Homkes, R. & Sull, C. — "Why Strategy Execution Unravels — and What to Do About It", Harvard Business Review (March 2015).
Survey research across 400+ companies and 8,000+ managers identifying that execution failures concentrate in cross-functional coordination, handoff integrity, and accountability diffusion — not in strategic planning quality. Primary empirical basis for the seven execution dimensions framework (decision quality, handoff integrity, ownership clarity, capacity allocation, systems coherence, directional clarity, follow-through discipline).
hbr.org/2015/03/why-strategy-execution-unravels-and-what-to-do-about-it -
Kaplan, R.S. & Norton, D.P. — "The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage", Harvard Business School Press (2008).
Establishes the measurement framework for translating strategic intent into operational financial outcomes. Conceptual basis for the Operating Income at Risk (OIaR) translation layer and the principle that execution risk must be expressed in financial terms to drive board-level action.
hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=35435 -
Bossidy, L. & Charan, R. — "Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done", Crown Business (2002).
Established the foundational business literature treating execution as a distinct, measurable, and manageable organisational discipline — separate from strategy. Referenced in the framing of execution capability as an investable variable rather than a cultural given.
Published by Crown Business / Random House -
Sull, D. & Eisenhardt, K.M. — "Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World", Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2015).
Research on how decision rules and priority structures affect execution quality under resource and time constraints. Supports the capacity allocation and directional clarity dimensions.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Blenko, M., Mankins, M. & Rogers, P. — "The Decision-Driven Organization", Harvard Business Review (June 2010).
Research establishing decision quality as the primary driver of organisational performance and operating income — ahead of structure, process, and incentives. Basis for "Decision Quality" as the first of the seven execution dimensions and the principle that unmade decisions have quantifiable costs.
hbr.org/2010/06/the-decision-driven-organization -
Kahneman, D., Lovallo, D. & Sibony, O. — "Before You Make That Big Decision", Harvard Business Review (June 2011).
Research on cognitive bias in executive decision-making, including overconfidence, sunk cost effects, and information filtering — all of which contribute to the execution risk patterns described in this article.
hbr.org/2011/06/before-you-make-that-big-decision
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COSO Enterprise Risk Management Framework — Integrating with Strategy and Performance (2017, Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission).
The standard ERM framework referenced when noting that traditional risk management was designed for financial exposure, regulatory liability, and operational hazard — and does not natively accommodate execution risk as a distinct, quantifiable category.
coso.org/resources/erm -
ISO 31000:2018 — Risk Management: Guidelines (International Organization for Standardization).
International standard for risk management principles. Referenced as part of the observation that established frameworks do not natively capture execution risk in the dimensions defined by NAVETRA™.
iso.org/standard/65694.html
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Purple Wins / NAVETRA™ Proprietary Assessment Methodology.
The 29% Operating Income at Risk (OIaR) figure cited in this article is derived from NAVETRA™'s proprietary execution risk assessment framework, developed and refined across client engagements and benchmarked against the published research cited in references 1–3 above. This figure represents a modelled benchmark estimate based on NAVETRA™'s methodology and should not be interpreted as a universal constant applicable to all organisations in all contexts. Individual OIaR will vary materially based on organisational size, complexity, industry, maturity, execution posture, and factors specific to each organisation's context.
purplewins.io/navetra -
McKinsey & Company — "The Irrational Side of Change Management", McKinsey Quarterly (April 2009).
Research on why organisational change and execution programmes fail, including the roles of psychological safety, incentive misalignment, and information architecture in determining execution outcomes. Supports the "Uncomfortable Truth" section and the observation that high-performing organisations carry hidden execution risk.
mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-irrational-side-of-change-management
This article has been prepared by Purple Wins for informational and thought-leadership purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, legal advice, accounting advice, or any form of professional advisory service. Nothing in this article should be relied upon as the basis for any investment, business, operational, or governance decision without independent professional verification.
The 29% Operating Income at Risk (OIaR) figure cited in this article is derived from Purple Wins' proprietary NAVETRA™ assessment methodology and represents a modelled benchmark estimate based on that methodology applied across a range of organisational contexts. It is not a guarantee, prediction, or representation of the financial impact that any specific organisation will experience. Individual results will vary materially based on organisational size, industry, maturity, execution posture, data quality, and other factors outside Purple Wins' control or knowledge. Past performance of the methodology in other contexts is not indicative of results in any specific organisation.
The seven execution dimensions described in this article (decision quality, handoff integrity, ownership clarity, capacity allocation, systems coherence, directional clarity, and follow-through discipline) reflect Purple Wins' proprietary analytical framework. They are presented as a structured lens for organisational analysis, not as universally validated empirical constants. The academic and practitioner sources cited provide contextual support; they do not constitute endorsement of NAVETRA™ or validation of specific quantitative claims.
References to speed of insight ("minutes, not months") and 14-day action plan delivery reflect the designed capability of the NAVETRA™ platform under typical conditions. Actual timelines will depend on organisational size, complexity, data availability, and client-side engagement. Purple Wins makes no warranty of specific delivery timelines for any individual engagement.
References to academic researchers, consulting firms, standards bodies, and other institutions are made for attribution and context only. Purple Wins does not claim endorsement by, affiliation with, or validation from any institution, author, or organisation cited in this article. Readers are encouraged to consult primary sources directly and to apply appropriate professional judgement.
This article reflects the views and opinions of Purple Wins at the date of publication. The landscape of execution risk, organisational research, and management practice evolves; Purple Wins does not commit to updating this article to reflect subsequent developments.
NAVETRA™ is a trademark of Purple Wins. All other trademarks, registered names, and intellectual property referenced in this article remain the property of their respective owners. Purple Wins is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any organisation or institution mentioned in this article.
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