Where company strategy goes to die
Image by creativeart on Freepik

A global financial services organization was puzzled. Despite giving customer service reps more autonomy to build rapport with clients, satisfaction scores had flatlined. When they dug deeper, they discovered the problem: rigid quality assurance criteria were preventing reps from doing exactly what leadership wanted them to do.

According to Gartner research, the reps faced a cultural tension every single call. Should they prioritize call consistency, following the QA checklist to the letter? Or should they tailor the conversation to meet each customer’s individual needs? Leadership said one thing. The scorecards measured another. The reps were caught in the middle, making their best guess about what really mattered.

This story illustrates a problem hiding in plain sight across growing companies. According to Harvard Business Review, only 5% of employees understand their company’s strategy. The other 95% are out there making decisions every day, guessing at what matters most. And those guesses cost you money, customers, and momentum.

Big company way The SME way
Big companies try to solve this with expensive cascade programs, all-hands meetings, and dedicated communications teams. Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, built an entire matrix organization to coordinate strategy across divisions, only to watch bureaucracy increase and performance deteriorate until they scrapped the whole structure in the 1990s. SMEs face the same strategy execution problem, but with a different twist. You don’t have Philips’ bureaucracy. You have something worse: no time, no budget, and a founder’s brain that stopped scaling somewhere around employee number 50. Your strategy dies not from too many layers, but from inconsistent retelling, pivot confusion, and zero visibility into the gap between what you say and what actually happens.

There’s a third way.

One that gives you the alignment big companies pay millions for, without the alignment tax that comes with it.

How big companies kill strategy

Let’s start with the general problem, because it establishes just how universal this is.

Harvard Business Review research found that frontline employees are regularly asked to execute strategies “that others developed and that they may not understand, never mind feel committed or connected to.” Even the most brilliant strategy is worth nothing if it isn’t executed well, especially by your front line, the people who interact daily with your customers.

Philips discovered this the hard way. After World War II, they pioneered the matrix structure, with national organizations and product divisions operating as a network. The theory was elegant. The reality was brutal. According to McKinsey research

A product manager in Groningen complained they felt “the disadvantages of the matrix acutely.” By the 1990s, Philips had to completely rebuild their organizational structure.

The pattern is clear: strategy dies in the cascade. It’s a telephone game at scale, and every retelling loses fidelity.

How SMEs kill strategy differently

SMEs don’t have Philips’ bureaucracy. You face a different version of the same problem, one that’s just as painful and harder to see.

The founder’s brain doesn’t scale

Something changes when you cross 50 employees. Then 100. Then 150. It’s not gradual, these thresholds hit like steps.

| Size | What does the founder see |
| :–: | ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- |
| <50 | - You know how things work.
- You hired most of the employees.
- You trained half of them yourself.
- When someone asks, “How do we handle this?” you know the answer because you built the process.

|
| 50 | - Not everyone knows each other anymore.
- New hires ask questions, and you realize the answers aren’t making it through intact.
- The knowledge starts mutating as it passes through multiple retellings.

|
| 100 | - New hires learn from whoever trained them.
- And that person learned from someone else, who learned from someone else, who maybe heard you explain it two years ago.
- The knowledge mutates.
- As Molly Graham describes, crossing 50 employees means “not everyone knows each other” and “not everyone can be involved in everything or effortlessly understand the why of decisions.”
|
| 150 | - You discover teams are doing the same thing in completely different ways.
- Your strategy has become tribal knowledge, passed down through inconsistent retellings like an organizational game of telephone.

|

No time or budget for formal cascades

What is typical for big companies?

What can you do as an SME leader?

You know alignment matters. You just don’t have the resources to do what the textbooks say you should do.

` Strategy dies from neglect, not from bureaucracy.`

Fast pivots create version confusion

Your agility is a competitive advantage. You can pivot in a quarter while enterprise competitors take two years to turn the ship.

But pivots create their own problem: version confusion. “Wait, are we still prioritizing customer questions the old way or the new way?” Nobody knows which memo is current. There’s no change management process because you moved too fast to document the change.

An MIT Sloan Management Review study of 124 organizations found that only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company’s top five strategic priorities. One leading cause is lack of visibility on goals set at the team, department, and organizational levels.

If executives struggle to remember priorities, what chance do frontline employees have?

The values versus reality gap

You say “customer experience first” in the company meeting. You mean it. It’s in your values deck.

But the warehouse floor hears a different message. The operations manager says, “We need to hit our numbers this quarter.” The shipping supervisor translates that as “move faster.” And suddenly your “customer experience first” value becomes “ship it now, worry about quality later.”

You have no feedback loop showing you this disconnect. No measurement of the gap between stated values and actual behavior. Strategy dies because you can’t see where it’s breaking down.

The alignment tax

Here’s what misalignment actually costs you:

Company size Solutions
Big company - All-hands meetings
- Training sessions
- Repeated explanations
- Correcting misunderstandings
- Redoing work that didn’t follow the plan
- Expensive cascade programs
- Dedicated comms teams
- Change management consultants
- Formal training infrastructure
SME (with GenAI) - Strategy becomes queryable
- Alignment as side effect of Q&A & FAQs
- No overhead, just answers
- Upload docs and go

SMEs can’t afford the alignment tax. But you desperately need the alignment.

Here’s the breakthrough

Big companies are trapped by their investment in old cascade infrastructure (see table above). They’ve spent millions building that machinery, and now it’s hard to replace.

You can leapfrog them entirely. You can adopt the better model from day one.

The on-demand model

The traditional approach to strategy alignment assumes information flows one way: from leadership down through layers. Training happened already months ago. Documentation sits in folders, somewhere. So when someone has a question, they ask a person.

What if strategy could work the other way? What if instead of cascading information, you made it queryable?

Here’s how the on-demand model works in practice:

The operational layer: Your FAQs, SOPs, playbooks, and training videos become a queryable knowledge base. When someone needs to know “How do we handle damaged returns?” they ask and get an answer in seconds, cited to your actual documentation, with a confidence score showing how solid that answer is.

The strategic layer (optional): Add your mission, values and beliefs, and strategy documents as a foundation layer. Now when someone asks “When speed and quality conflict, which takes priority?” the system doesn’t just cite an SOP. It interprets the question through your strategic principles and translates strategy into a practical answer for that specific situation.

This is where the strategy-to-execution translation happens. Not through cascade programs, quarterly meetings, or hoping managers remember to explain it correctly. The GenAI system does the translation, grounding every answer in both your operational procedures and your strategic intent.

The system doesn’t guess or improvise. It pulls directly from what you’ve documented. Low confidence answers route to a human. And critically, the questions people ask reveal where your strategy is breaking down, what they’re confused about, where the knowledge gaps are.

This flips the model. Instead of hoping alignment happens through meetings and training, you measure it as a side effect of daily work. Instead of cascading strategy, strategy answers back.

How GenAI changes the game

Big companies build expensive strategy cascade programs. SMEs can’t afford that. But with GenAI, you don’t need to.

The breakthrough is this: strategy alignment can be measured as a side effect of Q&A. You don’t need to choose between expensive formal programs and hoping it sticks. There’s a third way that’s both cheaper and gives you visibility you’ve never had.

Documentation as strategy infrastructure

Every standard operating procedure, every playbook, every 60-second training video becomes part of your knowledge base. You’re not building a separate “strategy system.” You’re making your existing knowledge queryable.

The warehouse supervisor doesn’t need to remember whether speed or quality comes first. They ask, “How do we handle damaged returns?” and get an answer in 30 seconds, cited to the current SOP, with a confidence score showing how solid that answer is.

Don’t train employees, train a bot

Instead of training everyone on everything upfront, you answer questions on demand. Grounded responses with source citations, not hearsay from whoever happened to train them.

When someone asks a question, they don’t get the tribal knowledge version filtered through three retellings. They get the answer drawn directly from your documented strategy and processes.

Telemetry shows the execution gap

Here’s where it gets interesting. The questions people ask reveal where strategy is breaking down.

You see what they’re confused about. Coverage gaps become obvious when the same question gets asked twelve times in a month. Execution drift shows up when their questions differ from official policy. You know which teams and roles need clarity, which creates natural coaching opportunities.

A weekly digest shows you where the cascade would have broken. “Damaged returns” was asked twelve times this month by the warehouse team. That’s either a signal that your onboarding needs work or that your SOP isn’t clear enough. Either way, you can fix it.

Living strategy that measures itself

The question log becomes a real-time audit of strategy comprehension. You can see:

This isn’t a separate analytics project. It’s a natural byproduct of people doing their jobs and getting answers to daily questions.

Strategy that answers back

The old way was hoping strategy cascaded down through the organization. It didn’t. The 5% comprehension rate proves that.

The new way is strategy that answers back. Instead of cascading information through layers, you make strategy queryable. When someone needs to know “What matters most here?” they can ask and get a grounded answer with sources.

Think back to those customer service reps caught between call consistency and customer rapport. If they had been able to ask, “When QA criteria and customer needs conflict, which takes priority?” they would have gotten a clear answer cited to documented company policy, complete with a confidence score. The cultural tension might never have stalled their satisfaction scores.

This approach would have prevented it by giving frontline workers access to accurate, cited strategy in the moment they needed it.

Making it real

If the on-demand model resonates with your situation, here’s how to start.

You don’t need to boil the ocean. Pick one role in one department. The approach works like this: upload the playbooks and SOPs you already have, let that team start asking questions, and watch the weekly digest to see what they’re confused about.

You’ll measure what you couldn’t see before: the gap between what you think everyone knows and what they actually understand. That visibility alone changes how you lead.

The real advantage? Big companies are trapped in their expensive cascade infrastructure. You get to skip straight to the better model. No legacy systems to replace, no change management consultants to hire, no six-month rollout plans.

This is what Eanis was built for. It implements the on-demand model we’ve described: your documentation becomes queryable, answers come with confidence scores and source citations, low-confidence questions route to humans, and you get weekly digests showing where strategy is breaking down. Start with one role, no integrations required. Just upload and go.

Strategy alignment without the alignment tax. For SMEs who recognize that their founder’s brain stopped scaling somewhere around employee 50, and who want visibility into whether their values are actually guiding daily decisions.

Learn more about Eanis - See how it works - Schedule a call

References