Six weeks ago, the project kickoff was great. Everyone nodded. Now the initiative is three weeks behind, and nobody can tell you which decision it died on.

You're not imagining it, and you're not alone. Two-thirds to three-quarters of large organizations struggle to execute their strategy. MIT's Donald Sull, in Harvard Business Review, surveyed managers across more than 250 companies and found the real surprise: it isn't the plan, and it isn't alignment up and down the chain, which mostly works fine. It breaks sideways, in the handoffs between teams. Only nine percent of managers said they could fully rely on colleagues in other units.

When it stalls, most leaders respond by adding process. More frameworks, more oversight, more meetings about the meetings. It's like adding horsepower when the real problem is your line through the corner. More power into a bad line just gets you to the wall faster.

I've spent eighteen years working in those handoffs. After enough stalled initiatives, the same seven culprits kept showing up. They never make it into your project plan or your latest shiny 2x2 matrix. They hide behind friendly words like "alignment" and "communication." And they quietly eat the results your strategy was supposed to produce.

A few of them by name:

The Past Failures Tax. You walk in with a good plan, and the team has already decided it won't work. They're not reacting to you. They're reacting to the last two failures they tried to flag, back when it fell on deaf ears.

Team Relationship Debt. Distrust that piled up over time, now wearing a costume labeled "process issues" and "office politics."

Skipping Validation. The need was real. The launch still failed, because nobody checked whether the solution or the channel actually fit before betting the forecast on it.

Four more where those came from, plus the five moves I use to navigate through all of them.

Find which Factors are quietly killing your results, and get the moves to work through them. The abbreviated guide gives you the highlights, seven Factors and five Principles, in a few minutes. The full working guide expands each Factor and Principle in detail, adds a diagnostic to pinpoint your worst offenders, and shows you when to bring in outside help.