18/06/2026
Your Strategy Isn't What You Say. It's What You Fund.
One of the several factors that have impacted systems growth is such that, even after the business exists, your strategy isn't what's in the deck; it's what you actually fund, staff, and protect when things get hard.
This is a constant situation with founders and executives across Nigeria and beyond. A founder tells the public that growth is the priority, then spends 80% of the week firefighting day-to-day operations. A corporate client names "digital transformation" the year's flagship initiative, then staffs it with whoever happens to be free rather than their best people. The words say one thing. The calendar, the budget, and the organisation chart say another.
That gap between declared strategy and actual strategy is rarely a strategy problem. It's a resource allocation problem.
What the research actually shows
In a widely cited Harvard Business Review study, Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull surveyed executives across hundreds of companies and found that roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of large organisations struggle to execute their strategy. One detail from that research which stands out is that: only about half of middle managers could name even one of their company's top five priorities. Not articulate it well, name it at all.
That's not a communication problem. You can repeat a priority in every town hall and email for a year, and it still won't register if the budget, staffing, and calendar tell a different story. People believe what gets resourced, not what gets announced.
McKinsey's long-running research on capital reallocation makes the financial cost of this even more concrete. Tracking roughly 1,600 US-listed companies across 15 years, their researchers found that most firms allocate capital across business units in almost the same proportions year after year — what they call "stuck" capital. When they extended that analysis to cover a full 20 years and around 1,500 companies, they found the companies in the top third for actively reallocating capital between business units outperformed the bottom third by 2.4 percentage points in annual total returns to shareholders and that gap widened to 3.9 percentage points during economic downturns, precisely when most leaders freeze instead of redirecting. Active reallocators were also roughly 13% more likely to avoid bankruptcy or a forced acquisition than companies that left their capital where it had always been.
That's the financial version of what you will see anecdotally with founders constantly: companies that are willing to move money, people, and attention toward what's actually working, and away from what isn't — don't just feel more strategic. They measurably outperform the ones that don't.
Resources are more than money
Most people hear "resource allocation" and think budgets. But our own findings from several research is useful here: capital is only one resource companies move. People and R&D funding move too, even if they're harder to track on a balance sheet. Every organisation, a two-person startup or a 2,000-person enterprise allocates five things every day, whether deliberately or by default:
1. Leadership attention — what you spend your time talking about becomes what your team believes matters, regardless of what's written in the strategy document.
2. Talent — if your most important initiative is led by your most junior hire, that tells the organisation exactly how important it really is.
3. Capital — every naira or dollar you commit is a vote for the future you're building, or the past you're protecting.
4. Organisational energy — not every initiative deserves equal meetings, approvals, and oversight. Spread it evenly across ten priorities and usually none of them get enough to succeed.
5. Decision-making capacity — every team has a ceiling on how many decisions it can process well. Overload it, and even good initiatives stall in approval queues.
Leading with strategy and growth systems, we have seen SMEs with brilliant market positioning lose ground because the founder couldn't let go of a legacy product line long enough to properly fund the new one. We have also watched fully board-approved enterprise transformation programmes quietly die because the strongest managers never actually moved off their existing portfolios. Different scale, same root cause.
Why leaders avoid doing this
Reallocating resources is political. It means choosing winners and losers, and most leaders; founder or executive would rather spread resources evenly across competing priorities than make that call. It feels safer. It avoids the hard conversation.
There's also a market-level reason this is hard, and it's counterintuitive. McKinsey's researchers found that markets initially punish companies for reallocating aggressively — share prices often dip in the first year or two as profits in the short term take a hit, and only reward it once results become visible, usually a few years later. So the leaders who reallocate decisively are often making a bet that looks worse before it looks better. That's a hard sell in a quarterly-results culture, and an even harder one when you're a founder watching cash flow weekly.
But evenly distributed resources rarely produce exceptional outcomes. They produce mediocrity. Real progress requires concentration, and concentration requires saying no to things that are also good ideas.
A five-question audit
If you want your organisation's real strategy, not the one in the slide deck, then ignore the mission statement and answer this instead:
1. Where did leadership spend most of its time in the last six months?
2. Which initiatives got the largest budget increases?
3. Where were your strongest people assigned?
4. Which projects got immediate attention the moment something went wrong?
5. What would keep running tomorrow if your budget got cut in half?
The answers are your real strategy. Everything else is aspiration.
The discipline most avoid
The best-run organisations we've worked with aren't the ones with the most polished plans. They're the ones willing to make deliberate trade-offs — to actually decide what they'll stop funding, stop staffing, and stop protecting, so something else gets a real chance. The research suggests this isn't just good instinct; it's measurably correlated with survival and shareholder returns, even when the early numbers say otherwise.
Resources are finite: time, talent, capital, attention, decision-making bandwidth. If your priorities aren't limited too, you don't have a strategy. You have a wish list.
Follow the money. Follow the talent. Follow the attention. Follow the decisions. That's where you'll find your real strategy; whether you're running a five-person startup or sitting on an executive committee.
