A Strategic Center is Just a Better Slide Until Someone Owns It.

A strategic center is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. McGrath is right that companies need one. But a center nobody owns, decides on, or builds into the work is just a better-worded slide. Clarity chosen in a room dies in the same execution gap as every other strategy.

Rita McGrath has a sharp piece coming in Harvard Business Review on what she calls strategic centering. The argument, briefly: as the old strategic anchors dissolve and value moves from physical assets to intangible ones like data and capability, companies can no longer lean on the frameworks that used to orient them. What they need instead is a center. One coherent organizing principle that decides what the company is really about, and therefore what it funds, what it chases, and what it ignores. Choose one, she argues, and you get clarity, speed, and a lot less internal politics.

She is right. A company without a center is a company where every priority looks equally valid, which is the same as having no priorities at all. If you have ever watched a leadership team try to fund eleven strategic initiatives with the budget for three, you have seen the absence of a center, and it is not pretty.

So this is not a disagreement. It is the sentence that comes after hers.

A center is a decision made in a room. Execution is what happens to that decision after everyone leaves the room. And the gap between those two things is where centers die.

The failure is almost never choosing the wrong center. It is choosing a real, defensible center and then never making it real in the work. It gets named. It goes on a slide. It gets repeated at the all-hands with genuine conviction. And then every team walks back to their desk and keeps doing exactly what they did the week before, because nothing downstream of the announcement actually changed. The center exists in the deck and nowhere else. It is, at that point, decoration.

I have watched leadership teams land on a genuinely good center and still fail to execute against it, and the pattern is always the same. A center only changes anything when it changes three concrete things. What you say no to. Who owns the trade-offs when priorities collide. And what your operating cadence actually reinforces week to week. If those three do not move, you do not have a center. You have a theme.

Here is the part that should make any leader sit up. McGrath's own premise makes this harder, not easier. She is describing a world where work has dematerialized. But the more intangible and distributed the work becomes, the less a center can survive on its own. When work was physical, the center had physical anchors. A factory floor. A product you could hold. A building everyone walked into, where a manager could see drift happening and correct it in the hallway. Strip all of that away, scatter the team across time zones and tools, and the center has nothing holding it in place except how people decide, own, and follow through. The center now lives entirely in the execution structure, or it does not live at all.

So if you want a center to be more than a better slide, three things have to happen after you choose it.

First, translate the center into a stop-doing list. A center that does not kill any existing work is not a center, it is a slogan. The clarity McGrath promises does not come from naming what matters. It comes from naming what no longer does, out loud, with budget and headcount attached. If nothing got cut, nothing got centered.

Second, assign ownership of the trade-offs, not just the vision. The vision has a sponsor already. What it usually lacks is a named person who decides, when two real priorities collide, which one the center favors. Name that person before the collision, not during it. Otherwise the collision gets escalated, stalls, and the center loses to whoever pushes hardest.

Third, build the center into the cadence. If your center never shows up in how you run your weekly and monthly reviews, your team will quietly and correctly conclude that it was rhetoric. People believe what gets inspected, not what gets announced. A center that is never on the agenda is a center no one is accountable to.

McGrath gives you the center, and that is real, hard, valuable strategy work. But choosing the center is the part that happens in the room. Carrying it is everything after. And everything after is where most organizations lose the plot, not because they picked the wrong principle, but because no one owned the unglamorous work of making it true.

A strategic center is just a better slide until someone owns it. Strategy is common. Execution is rare.

If your team has a solid strategy but execution keeps stalling, let's talk about what is getting in the way and how to fix it.