Strategic Drag
Description
If you have read the books on strategy execution and you still sense something important is leaking away - this is the book that explains why.
Most books on strategy execution focus on the logical side: clearer plans, sharper accountability, better processes. They are not wrong. They simply operate above the level where execution actually slows. They tell you what to fix. They cannot show you the hidden forces that broke it in the first place.
Strategic drag is the name for what those books don't reach: the accumulated psychological friction that builds between a chief executive's decisions and what an organisation actually does. It forms in what authority does to truth, what pressure does to candour, and what silence really means in a senior room. It is almost always invisible until it has already cost you. By the time it shows in the numbers, it has usually been present for months. By the time the board is asking why, you are no longer shaping what comes next. You are explaining what went wrong.
Drawing on twenty-five years advising chief executives across listed companies, private-equity-backed businesses, entrepreneur-led and family-owned firms worldwide, Roger E Jones reveals the hidden psychology that determines whether your strategy moves or quietly stalls. Strategic Drag follows the direction drag actually takes - from the isolation at the top, through the invisible forces running your executive team, to the wider organisation your strategy must pass through.
Inside, you will understand:
- Why your executive team's agreement, silence and nodding are rarely what they appear - and what is actually being concealed before anyone speaks
- How your own behaviour under pressure creates the very conditions that slow execution - through overconfidence, stress-driven control, and the stories that harden too fast
- Why truth learns when it is safe to arrive - and how chief executives unknowingly train their organisations to delay it until it is expensive
- How the five stages of strategic drag unfold - from the earliest conversational signals to the moment the board stops asking about the strategy and starts asking about you
- What it takes to restore momentum by changing the conditions strategy moves through - not by pushing harder on a plan already working against its environment
Roger E Jones is a CEO advisor focused on the human dynamics that determine whether strategy holds or drags. He has twenty-five years' experience working alongside chief executives, has conducted business in more than forty countries and holds an Executive Master's focusing on clinical organisational psychology from INSEAD. His work has been published in Harvard Business Review and INSEAD Knowledge.
Once you see these dynamics, they are hard to ignore. And once they are visible, the cost of ignoring them becomes harder to justify.
