From Activity to Alignment: Resetting Business Strategy

Section I: The Illusion of Motion — Why Activity Becomes the Enemy of Progress in Struggling Firms

In the corporate world, few fallacies are more persistent—or more damaging—than the belief that activity is a reliable proxy for progress. As companies stumble into periods of distress, the instinct to act intensifies. More projects are launched. More meetings are held. More dashboards and scorecards are created. The machinery of the firm whirs louder than ever, even as its direction becomes increasingly obscure. Yet this frenzied output often belies a deeper truth: beneath the surge of activity lies strategic drift, not direction. Action, for all its visibility, can conceal the absence of progress.

This paradox is especially acute in struggling firms, where the culture of “doing something” becomes a form of self-defense. Leaders, under pressure from boards, investors and employees, rush to demonstrate urgency. Operational teams, anxious to appear useful, devise initiatives and pilots, many of which have tenuous links to the firm’s underlying challenges. The result is an organisation that is increasingly busy but decreasingly coherent. Productivity declines even as effort increases. The dashboard lights glow green, but the ship remains off course.

The problem is not one of motivation or intent. Most employees in troubled firms work harder, not less. The problem is the misallocation of scarce resources—managerial attention, talent, capital—toward initiatives that may be energetic but irrelevant. In an economy where strategic advantage depends as much on what a company stops doing as on what it pursues, this confusion is more than a distraction. It is a liability.

When firms enter periods of underperformance, a familiar cycle begins. A new initiative is announced, often with great fanfare. Teams are assembled, goals are set, and progress is measured weekly. Within months, the initiative loses steam. Leadership shifts focus, and the cycle repeats. The ritual becomes self-perpetuating: a substitute for clarity, not a route to it.

Much of this behaviour stems from a cognitive bias rooted in survival instinct. When the environment becomes hostile, motion feels safer than reflection. In the biological world, this is adaptive. In corporate strategy, it is often fatal. The greater the uncertainty, the more important it becomes to pause, diagnose and choose with care. Yet the prevailing impulse in many companies is to accelerate—to launch more products, pursue new markets, restructure teams or rebrand altogether. In doing so, they create the appearance of control while drifting further from it.

The proliferation of key performance indicators (KPIs) has done little to arrest this drift. Instead, it has often exacerbated it. Modern firms track hundreds of metrics, from customer engagement to website clicks to internal response times. While some of these indicators are useful, many are little more than digital noise. The danger lies in mistaking measurement for meaning. In distressed firms, teams often highlight improvements in peripheral metrics—more app downloads, higher email open rates, longer session durations—even as core performance indicators such as revenue, margin or customer retention continue to deteriorate.

The overreliance on such metrics can foster what might be termed “management by dashboard.” In this approach, leaders optimise for short-term improvements in easily measured activity, without questioning whether those activities contribute to long-term value creation. The result is an organisation where every department can demonstrate progress, but none can explain how that progress translates into recovery. This phenomenon is particularly evident in software and service industries, where performance is often intangible and outcomes are subject to interpretation.

The structure of large organisations reinforces these tendencies. Middle management, caught between strategic ambiguity at the top and performance anxiety from below, often becomes the engine of misguided activity. In the absence of clear strategic direction, departments create their own. Human resources launches a culture initiative. Marketing revisits the brand. Operations introduces a new dashboard. Each effort may have merit in isolation. But collectively, they fragment the organisation’s focus and dilute its capacity for execution.

In many cases, the root of the problem lies not in execution but in language. Strategy, once a term denoting choice and trade-offs, has become a synonym for aspiration. Companies declare their commitment to “customer centricity,” “digital transformation” or “innovation” without specifying what they will no longer do. The result is an environment in which every initiative can claim to be strategic, and none are truly strategic in the classical sense. The boundaries of focus dissolve. Strategy becomes slogan.

The case of Sears provides a cautionary example. Once a retail colossus, the firm embarked on a flurry of transformations in the years leading to its demise. New store formats, digital initiatives, loyalty programmes and real estate ventures were all pursued simultaneously. None were given the time or resources to succeed. Leadership claimed to be executing on a multi-pronged strategy. In practice, the company lacked one. It spread its remaining capital and talent across too many fronts, ensuring that no front would succeed.

This phenomenon is not unique to Sears. It afflicts firms across industries, from telecommunications to consumer goods. In each case, the failure lies not in ambition but in prioritisation. In periods of decline, the opportunity cost of misdirected activity is immense. Every dollar spent on a non-core initiative is a dollar not spent on stabilising the business. Every hour consumed by secondary efforts is an hour not invested in resolving root causes.

Some firms recognise this. Rather than pursue an endless array of pilots and side bets, they embrace a form of strategic subtraction. They stop. They close underperforming divisions, shelve promising but distracting innovations, and focus relentlessly on fixing the core. This is not austerity. It is coherence. It reflects the recognition that focus is not a constraint on creativity but a condition for its success.

Consider the contrasting approaches of two industrial firms facing declining margins. One responded with an ambitious growth agenda: new geographies, expanded product lines and a customer experience overhaul. The other froze hiring, cut non-essential projects, and invested solely in supply chain efficiency. Within two years, the latter had returned to profitability. The former continued to struggle. The difference was not in effort. It was in clarity.

Stopping, in corporate terms, requires as much courage as starting. It means telling teams their work, however well-intentioned, is no longer aligned. It means confronting sunk costs and political capital invested in pet projects. Most of all, it means resisting the pressure to “do something” when the wiser path is to do less, but better. In cultures that equate visibility with value, this is a radical shift.

But it is a necessary one. Activity, unmanaged, becomes entropy. And in a firm already under stress, entropy accelerates decline. The discipline to prune—t

o say no, to choose fewer battles, to resist the temptation of motion—is often the defining difference between firms that recover and those that do not.

Progress is not the sum of activity. It is the product of alignment. And alignment, in turn, begins with the humility to ask whether what is being done is truly helping—or merely hiding the fact that the business has lost its way.

Section II: From Noise to Navigation — How to Reset Strategy with Precision and Restraint

If the first casualty of corporate distress is profitability, the second is clarity. Companies under pressure often lose their sense of direction, replacing it with improvisation. Initiatives proliferate, but cohesion evaporates. What these firms require is not more activity, but greater restraint. Strategy, in such circumstances, is not an exercise in ambition. It is a discipline of exclusion.

Resetting direction in a struggling business begins with a change in mindset. Most turnaround efforts fail not because they are underpowered, but because they are overextended. The central task is to reimpose logic: to reduce noise, restore focus and reclaim control over the allocation of time, capital and talent.

A sound strategy is not a wishlist. It is a series of choices. And the most fundamental of those choices is to decide what not to pursue.

Many executives claim to embrace this idea. In practice, few implement it. Strategic planning sessions often produce a laundry list of goals, each attached to metrics and timelines. But these are not strategies; they are aspirations. Without a coherent theory of the business—why it wins, whom it serves, and how it sustains advantage—no set of initiatives will generate more than episodic improvements.

The challenge lies in the seductive nature of action. In troubled firms, every department has an agenda, every function a programme. But the abundance of plans creates dilution, not direction. What is required is a cull.

The most effective resets begin not with forecasting, but with diagnosis. They ask a few hard questions: Where is the real bottleneck to profitability? What customer segment has eroded most sharply? Which cost centre is growing fastest relative to revenue? These questions are rarely answered in the boardroom. They demand a return to primary data—customer cohorts, retention curves, cost attribution models, unit-level profitability.

The objective is to stop treating symptoms and start addressing causes. Many turnaround plans fail precisely because they misdiagnose. A drop in revenue is treated with sales incentives, when the real problem is product obsolescence. Margin compression is tackled with pricing initiatives, when the true issue lies in supply-chain volatility or fixed cost overhang.

Root-cause analysis, though painstaking, is essential. In a distribution firm struggling with profitability, the application of a simple cohort analysis—tracking new customer behaviour by month of acquisition—revealed that recently acquired customers were churning at three times the historical rate. The issue was not pricing or service. It was sales targeting. A corrective shift in lead qualification criteria did more to restore profitability than any broad operational overhaul.

Once a clear diagnosis is made, the next task is to rebuild a model of compounding advantage. Most successful firms operate some version of a flywheel—a core feedback loop in which improvements in one domain feed performance in others. In Amazon’s early years, this loop consisted of low prices driving traffic, which attracted more sellers, expanding selection and thus further reinforcing traffic and cost advantage. The flywheel created momentum. Momentum created scale. And scale created margin.

Struggling firms often lack such a mechanism. Their activities are scattered. Progress is localised. A proper strategic reset involves identifying where such a flywheel can exist, however modestly. For a software firm, it may lie in customer success driving retention, which reduces acquisition pressure and improves margin. For a retailer, it may stem from improved merchandising accuracy reducing markdowns and boosting profitability.

Once the flywheel candidate is identified, priorities can be set. But these must be few. In firms under stress, the act of narrowing focus is itself a source of stability. A simple rule can be helpful: three core objectives, each broken into no more than three workstreams. This is not a planning gimmick. It is a constraint designed to force trade-offs. If more than nine initiatives are underway, the firm is likely diffusing its attention.

Each workstream must be fully resourced and attached to measurable outcomes. Resource allocation is where strategy meets reality. Many plans fail not because the idea is wrong, but because the organisation funds it halfway—assigning junior staff, denying capital, or underinvesting in systems. Prioritisation without resourcing is performance theatre.

Timing matters, too. In turnaround conditions, sequencing can determine success. Infrastructure must precede scale. Data hygiene must precede automation. Hiring must follow—not lead—process reform. Without correct sequencing, initiatives collapse under their own ambition.

An effective planning horizon consists of two tracks: one short-term (typically six months), aimed at stabilisation; and one medium-term (twelve to eighteen months), aimed at repositioning. These tracks should be managed in parallel but separately. The mistake many firms make is to blend the two, thereby compromising both.

Strategic plans must also include stop conditions—explicit criteria for abandoning or pivoting initiatives. These are essential safeguards against inertia. A turnaround without built-in exit ramps is one likely to recreate the very conditions it seeks to escape.

Feedback loops are essential to adaptation. Too many firms still treat strategy as a document, not a process. They craft detailed plans and present them to stakeholders, only to file them away until the next planning cycle. A more effective model treats the plan as a hypothesis. Each initiative is an experiment. Each output must be tested against defined benchmarks. Progress is reported, not in anecdotes or volume metrics, but in outcome indicators—cost per unit, margin by product line, customer retention by cohort.

Digital tools allow this real-time visibility. But tools alone are insufficient. Governance must change. A fortnightly rhythm of review, recalibration and resource reallocation ensures that strategy remains alive. In firms that recover successfully, the strategic function becomes operationally embedded. Finance and operations sit alongside product and customer success. The language shifts from strategy as inspiration to strategy as iteration.

These practices—focus, sequencing, feedback—may sound mundane. But they are the ingredients of coherence. And coherence is what struggling firms most often lack. By reducing surface-level activity and increasing strategic precision, companies move from noise to navigation.

The gains of this approach are cumulative. Small improvements compound. Customer pain points are addressed. Profitability returns. Morale stabilises. And the organisation regains not only performance, but purpose.

There is no grand secret to resetting a firm in trouble. The levers are well known: choose, diagnose, focus, sequence, measure, adapt. But they are rarely pulled in the right order or with enough discipline. That is because the logic of recovery runs counter to the culture of modern business, which values scale, speed and visibility.

Real strategy requires patience. It requires the willingness to delay action until clarity is achieved, and to act narrowly rather than broadly. It requires acknowledging that leadership is not measured by motion, but by the capacity to choose wisely when to move—and when to stop.

Firms that recover do so not by trying to be better at everything. They recover by being better at fewer things. And in the long run, that is what makes all the difference.