Fumble: Why “Execution Risk” Is The Silent Killer of Strategy
May 1, 2025
In the business world, it’s not uncommon to hear that “execution eats strategy for breakfast.” Yet too many companies fail to act on this truth. They focus on crafting ambitious plans, commissioning expensive consultants, or talking up transformation in town halls—only to watch their strategic intent collapse under the weight of inaction, dysfunction, or sheer indecision.
This isn’t a resource issue. It’s not even always a capability issue.
It’s an execution risk issue—and it’s one of the most dangerous threats facing organizations today.
What Is Execution Risk?
Execution risk is the likelihood that a company’s plans and strategies fail not because they’re poorly designed, but because they’re poorly executed—or not executed at all.
In theory, it’s everyone’s job to get things done. But in practice, things break down:
- Leadership hesitates.
- Ownership avoids hard calls.
- Decisions get delayed or diluted.
- Accountability gets fuzzy.
- The wrong people are protected. The right people are ignored.
And soon, a business that looked solid on paper is bleeding money, customers, and morale.
15 Ways Execution Risk Derails Manufacturing Operations
In manufacturing, where operations depend on precision, speed, and coordination, execution risk shows up in costly and compounding ways:
- Delayed capital equipment upgrades, forcing reliance on obsolete machinery and increasing maintenance costs.
- Inability to standardize processes across shifts, leading to inconsistent quality and higher defect rates.
- Failure to forecast raw material needs, resulting in stockouts and production delays.
- Not retraining operators on new systems, creating a knowledge gap that slows output.
- Ignoring minor quality issues, which later become systemic and cause large-scale recalls.
- Excessive downtime due to reactive maintenance, because no one enforced preventive maintenance schedules.
- Tolerating poor-performing line supervisors, causing high turnover among reliable floor workers.
- Overproduction of slow-moving inventory, tying up cash flow and warehouse space.
- Implementing a new ERP system without adequate training, leading to order entry errors and fulfillment chaos.
- Postponing safety upgrades, risking OSHA violations or serious injuries.
- Choosing not to automate repetitive tasks, even when ROI is clear, due to fear of change.
- Conflicting KPIs across departments, causing logistics to undermine production goals.
- Allowing too many SKUs to proliferate, straining operations with low-volume complexity.
- Failing to act on early supplier quality warnings, resulting in downstream production stoppages.
- Not updating layouts for lean manufacturing, resulting in wasted motion, time, and energy.
These failures are rarely because teams don’t know what’s wrong—it’s because they can’t or aren’t allowed to fix it.
15 Ways Execution Risk Wreaks Havoc in Service Organizations
In service businesses, where performance is powered by people, execution risk is more subtle—but no less destructive:
- Avoiding tough conversations with underperformers, eroding high-performer morale.
- Overpromising to clients without operational follow-through, leading to reputational damage.
- Letting customer complaints sit unresolved, because no one “owns” the problem.
- Rewarding tenure over contribution, resulting in a stagnant and disengaged workforce.
- Micromanaging high performers, pushing them to disengage or leave.
- Sidelining internal innovators, because their ideas challenge the status quo.
- Fumbling onboarding processes, leaving new hires undertrained and overwhelmed.
- Over-customizing client solutions, exhausting internal teams and destroying margin.
- Avoiding investment in service automation, causing inefficiencies and long response times.
- Treating toxic managers as “too valuable to lose”, while their teams burn out.
- Not resolving internal turf wars, creating silos and communication breakdowns.
- Over-indexing on consensus in leadership, slowing decisions to a crawl.
- Letting disengaged employees coast, while top contributors take on too much.
- Delaying fee increases for fear of client backlash, despite rising costs and eroding profitability.
- Failing to scale service capacity with growth, leading to missed SLAs and churn.
Every one of these scenarios represents a failure to execute—a missed opportunity, an avoidable loss, or a self-inflicted wound.
The Cultural Side of Execution Risk
Execution risk doesn’t just arise from flawed systems or poor project management. Often, it’s cultural:
- A fear of conflict masquerading as politeness.
- A loyalty to “how we’ve always done it.”
- An unwillingness to confront reality until it’s too late.
- A workplace where the weeds get watered and the flowers are left to wilt.
If your best people feel unseen while your worst are coddled, you’re not just risking poor execution—you’re cultivating it.
How to De-Risk Execution
Here are five moves strong leaders make to reduce execution risk:
- Decide fast, fix fast. Speed matters. You can course-correct more easily than you can resurrect momentum.
- Name clear owners. If no one owns it, it doesn’t get done.
- Reward action, not activity. Execution comes from results, not noise or busywork.
- Shore up the middle. Your frontline managers either drive execution or drain it.
- Confront hard truths. Bad news doesn’t get better with age.
Closing Thought
Execution risk is rarely visible on a balance sheet until it’s too late. But look closer—at missed deadlines, at team attrition, at customer churn—and it’s there, hiding in plain sight.
The good news? It’s fixable.
But it requires leadership to lead, not just talk. To make decisions. To confront underperformance. To lift up the doers and stop protecting the blockers.
Because in business, strategy may set the direction—but execution determines the destination.
Paul Fioravanti, MBA, MPA, CTP, is the CEO & Managing Partner of QORVAL Partners, LLC, a FL-based advisory firm (founded 1996 by Jim Malone, (1942-2021) six-time Fortune 100/500 CEO) Qorval is a US-based growth and exit advisory, turnaround, restructuring, business optimization and interim management firm. Fioravanti is a proven advisor and CEO with experience in more than 90 situations in more than 40 industries. He earned his MBA and MPA from The University of Rhode Island and completed advanced post-master’s research in finance and marketing at Bryant University. He is a Certified Turnaround Professional and member of the Turnaround Management Association, the Private Directors Association, Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Association of Merger & Acquisition Advisors (AM&MA), the American Bankruptcy Institute, and IMCUSA. Copyright 2025, Qorval Partners LLC and/or Paul Fioravanti, MBA, MPA, CTP. All rights reserved. No reproduction or redistribution without permission.
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