🍔 We Asked For Your Best. You Sent Your Lunch Break 🥪- Cross Functional Representation Strategy Execution Office
There's an old business principle nobody's ever put in a textbook, but everyone's lived through. When a company wide initiative asks each department for "your best person," what you actually get is whoever's calendar had a two hour gap that Tuesday. Not a betrayal, not even really a choice, just the natural outcome of "best" and "available" almost never being the same person at the same time.
This is one of the quietest ways Principle 2, Establish an Enterprise Function to Orchestrate Strategy Execution, breaks before it ever gets a chance to work. That Principle depends entirely on real engagement and strong representation from the functions that need to partner with the Strategy Execution Office across the organization. Every function will technically send someone to that table, but sending someone and sending the person who could actually move the needle aren't the same commitment, and most organizations only make the first one. The people who could genuinely influence the outcome are almost always already fully allocated to the work their own function gets measured on, so the partnership ends up built on whoever happened to be available, not whoever was actually capable of representing that function well.
The operating system Principle 2 calls for integrates Strategic Portfolio Management, Architecture and Op Model Design, FP&A, Project Execution, and Change Management, and unifies every critical function across the organization. That kind of integration depends on strong representation showing up to partner with the Strategy Execution Office, not a placeholder sent to fill a seat. Real cross functional participation requires a visible C-Suite mandate that makes engagement with the Strategy Execution Office an expectation embedded in each function's own accountability, not a favor someone does when they've got a spare hour between meetings.
The 10 Key Principles of Strategy Execution aren't something we came up with on our own. They're being defined in the open by the StrategyXF community, multi disciplinary leaders and practitioners from Strategy, Operations, Finance, HR, Architecture, Transformation, PMO, Delivery, and Change Management, coming together to name the real challenges holding organizations back from mastering Strategy Execution, and to share what's actually worked. This scene came directly from that conversation.
Where has your organization asked for engagement from critical functions and gotten whoever happened to be free that week instead?👇Â
StrategyXF Painfully Accurate Series (Sad, but True!)
This cartoon is part of Painfully Accurate, a StrategyXF series built from real Strategy Execution challenges our members have actually lived through, laughed about, and found a way past.
Every scene started as something a leader or practitioner described, not a hypothetical, an actual moment somebody in this community said out loud and everyone else in the room recognized instantly. Sad but true, every one of them, and every one of them survivable.
If any of this feels a little too familiar, you're exactly who this community was built for. Join StrategyXF and help us turn these shared war stories into the practical, personalized strategies that finally put them behind us.
