Markets are competitive, and firms that compete in them seek competitive advantage.

That’s how profit and survival are both achieved. The question at the start of competitive advantage is, “How will we achieve sufficient advantage over other firms in our markets or other markets to generate profits and survive?”

For decades, the answer to this question would be the source of all work done by the organisation in question - perhaps for years afterwards. Automotive companies generated multi-year vehicle platform strategies, property investment companies projected decade-long building use strategies, and governments created 5-year plans for growth and prosperity.

The plan was always straightforward. Work out the strategy, then transform the organisation to deliver against it. Indeed, Chandler and Mintzberg (1962) stated that structure follows strategy. At the time, it probably did…

Switch view to the modern competitive environment and business context, and a few differences are noteworthy.

Information travels quickly

Knowledge liquidity means that unique IP is not unique for long, competitors can copy quickly, and even IP protection is difficult when small changes mean differentiation is achieved. Fifty years ago, a novel manufacturing technique used by an organisation in Shanghai might be unseen by a competitor in Rio de Janiero for many months or even years, however today that advantage may only last for weeks.

Context changes quickly

The impact of Covid-19 was immediate, and unavoidable. No matter what contingency organisations had in place, business was interrupted. This is an example of a change to context that wipes out all strategy work conducted in advance, and requires a reconsideration of corporate direction. Put simply, every organisation’s strategy was impacted by this pandemic. Of course, the Covid-19 shock is extreme, but changes to consumer taste can occur overnight, social media influencers can redirect demand within hours, and customer reviews can change perception of a product and even brand. And those impacts may even be on a competitor, not on the organisation in focus, but the market still changes.

Resources are highly mobile

Key people in organisations are able to move between those organisations within a few months, contractually and geographically. Entire teams can be built by competitors within months, and capabilities transformed. This leads us to consider that a particular employee, partner, or other member of the organisation cannot be a competitive advantage. This can be extended to equipment, processors, storage, facilities, buildings and more. While a prime location on Times Square is difficult to replicate, using an Offshore Delivery Centre to reduce costs is relatively straightforward, and it is the latter that will be the experience of most organisations.

Faster supply, more IT

The movement of industry from heavy-machinery centric to tech centric means that the technology available to iorgansiations may be the source of advantage. While there is a long lead time on a heavy press in a steel-working factory, there is almost instant availability of the IT backbone that runs the entity. Even the production of that heavy press is faster because the supplier and supply chain are fully IT enabled. design, pre-production testing, and logistics are all more efficient, closing the time for advantage for the first mover in the market.

So, the competitive advantage experienced by a locomotive manufacturer in 1930’s UK may have been across a number of years, while the competitive advantage experienced by a recruitment firm with work from home patterns may be limited to days or even hours.

In this situation, we need to look back at Chandler and Mintzberg’s assertion that structure follows strategy. If this is the case, then each time strategy changes the structure will be reviewed and likely change.

Each time there is a change to senior leadership, each market context change, each demand pattern change, each innovation to processes or tools, each global political change, all of these events cause potential change to strategy. These changes are more frequent as well.

So should the organisation revise structure each time there is a change to these factors? The evidence I see every week is that organisation are locked in a cycle of structure trying to keep up with strategy. From separating run and change, through to ‘run-and-change’ practices, we see that strategy is a detached preface to the whole business. Leaders tell the organisation about direction, then expect it to follow, and when it doesn’t, strategy is often to blame.

Think back to the stories you heard (and maybe told!) about Nokia, Blockbuster, Toys R Us. What is the theme? They chose the wrong horse, the strategy was wrong, they didn’t identify changes to customer behaviour, they refused to pivot when the opportunities arose. And yet, the organisations were rich, successful, and staffed with intelligent business leaders ad team members.

So, maybe Chandler and Mintzberg were right about then, but less so about now?

Strategy thinking goes so far but…

Porter wrote that advantage is the result of a deliberate choice, taking a position within an industry structure, defined by bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of buyers, threat of substitutes, threat of new entrants, and the threat of current participants (rivals). So, a competitive advantage is observable at a point in time, and each factor is considered to give a view of attractiveness of market opportunity. This is not about long-term advantage, but about the availability of a potentially advantageous position in a market at a time.

Barney looked within the organisation and proposed that VRIN (valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable) resources, including people, were the key to achieving advantage in the market, however this is again at a point in time. There are not many people who satisfy VRIN today - perhaps famous leaders of organisations, the majority of people have certifications, experience, and expertise. People are highly mobile, and they can transfer and spread knowledge of process, market, and organisation decision-making within months, even with non-compete clauses in contracts.

Teece noted that change to context should be treated, and wrote that organisations must sense the change, act on it, and transform afterwards. This may leave the organisation in focus running behind those who make the market, with a lag between context change and sensing the change, then lags again to seizing the opportunity and transforming to establish a new position. and when change comes almost weekly, bottlenecks in this flow appear.

D’Aveni (writing more recently than those already mentioned) recognised the increased speed of change, and postulated that organisations could achieve competitive positions but these would not be enduring so they would lose leader status and need to rebuild regularly to remain ahead of others across rolling cycles of temporary advantage. To some extent the problem for Teece is alsom a problem for D’Aveni - should organisations be in a constant state of rebuilding towards a new strategy, perhaps starting a restructure each quarter?

The real-world

Organisations in market-leading positions restructure less frequently that the scenarios above would lead us to believe. Consider ‘Big 4’ consulting firms, ‘Magic Circle’ law firms, and major tech firms. how do they remain in market-leading positions?

Perhaps it is because they are so focused on what they do and how well they do it they focus less on strategy and definition of the business and use it as a directional device.

Instead of ‘We will restructure to become an AI-centred organisation’ they may state ‘AI is at the centre of the work we do’. Instead of restructuring, they modify their current operation to include the subject of the strategy. So, strategy is a layer in the organisation that assumes a great deal is already working well.

This brings an interesting advantage to the organisation. By changing some part of the entity, it is able to contend with rapidly changing environments and contexts, and assocaited change in strategic intent. The organisation is also able to smoothly deal with leadership and ownership change.

Looking forward, not back

The stories about Nokia, Blockbuster, and Toys R Us are interesting - great for smiles and smirks in a conference speech or training course - however they are limited by our viewpoint. We are looking for strategic issues in organisations we know have failed.

The question for consultants, academics, and business leaders now is, “How do we achieve a position of competitive advantage that is maintained across many reporting periods?” That is, how can organisations acheive the state of Maintained Competitive Advantage?

The organisation as the substrate

What if the strategy followed structure?

Barney was correct - the organisation cannot pursue a strategy if it lacks the needed resources. But what if the resources are replaced by the whole organisation in the phrase, and what if the organisation was capable of delivering against almost any strategy (within reason)?

What if we built an organisation to be the enabler for strategic intent, even as that intent changes?

Then we will have an adaptive organisation that can change with the needs of market, context, politics, anything.

The Five Levers of Maintained Competitive Advantage

For it to be a flexible substrate, an organisation must understand its ability to modify its competitive stance. The Five Levers of Competitive Advantage framework provides the basis for understanding current state, analysing competitor and market states, identifying near-term target state, proposing long-term aspirational state.

That is, the framework can be used to understand the availability of a Competitive Advantage position for an organisation, and serve as the basis for improvement.

Once the state of competitive advantage is achieved, the organisation maintains the state through ongoing reference to the framework, assessment, monitoring, and prioritised change to create an ever-adapting substrate.

Strategy is part of the framework, a key component of the Maintained Competitive Advantage state. In fact, there are Five Levers to consider:

1. Strategy

2. Leadership

3. Culture

4. Ways of Working and Execution

5. Strategic Architecture

And all the way through this framework, there is one element that drives the organisation’s thinking. Customer value. All Five Levers are animated in response to the passion of the organisation for satisfying the customers’ needs. Anything that threatens customer value is scrutinised and a response is generated. This in turn means that structures that affect the ability of the organisation to deliver that value should be changed.

Value streams

So, we begin with the most visible change that will be made by the vast majority of organisations that seek Maintained Competitive Advantage market positioning.

Siloed organisation structures encourage departmental targeting, air gaps in process, and limited consideration of final customer satisfaction. Hand-offs cause delays, and knowledge is ring-fenced. Eventually the customer received a diluted, or worse still unusable, outcome.

Flow-based working practices are well-established, and they are a critical component of organisation design for advantage over time. They seek to eliminate the disadvantages of siloed practices and improve customer value. When aligned with strategic intent, they are the direct link between work performed and strategy for the organisation. The Strategic Value Streams Body of Knowledge describes this well.

Organisational Viscosity

The benefit of Value Stream based working practices is the focus on flow of work, and reduction in hand-offs. In fact, every decision, wait, queue, meeting, and event in the organisation is a source of friction in delivery of value. Reduce friction and you increase speed, value, and happiness. This friction is termed ‘Organisational Viscosity’ and can be thought of as the conceptual measure of the ease of doing business in the organisation.

In some contexts, some friction keeps the organisation safe. Consider banks that survive financial shocks because they took decisions more slowly than risk-takers who failed. In other cases, that friction is the opportunity seen by new entrants who seek to exploit inefficiency in service. Consider vehicle producers that have been slow to respond to changes in technology and energy sources.

Changing the Value Stream

Projects and Programmes are not replaced in Value Streams, instead the project is run by the Value Stream, and Programmes that touch many Value Streams are staffed by seconded Value Stream members. Change should be caused by those who understand the change and its impact, and those who will live with the change over time. This is similar to a ‘run and change’ and DevOps mindset.

Conclusion

Maintained Competitive Advantage is not bought with analytical insight, and it is certainly not bought by accumulating initiatives with the word transformation in the title. It appears when strategy, architecture, governance, finance and delivery are aligned well enough to hold flow steady under volatility.

Porter on trade-offs, Barney on resources, Teece on capabilities, D’Aveni on instability: each considered part of the question.

Advantage decays when intent outruns architecture, when projects stand in for systems, and when funding logic fractures accountability. It is maintained when organisational form becomes a capability in its own right, so the firm can not only achieve distinction but renew it as the environment changes.

Which makes MCA less a strategic outcome than a structural accomplishment. It is not reached by aspiration. It is built.

The monthly performance review occupied the same slot every cycle: nine o’clock on a Tuesday, third week of the month, the large glass-walled room on the fourth floor that nobody had formally named but everyone called the fishbowl. The view from its windows was of the internal atrium, which meant that people walking through the building could see in. Tim had always thought this was either an accident of the original fit-out or a very deliberate piece of architectural messaging. Either way, it meant that meetings in this room were conducted with an unconscious awareness of being observed.

He arrived early, as he usually did, and took his habitual seat on the long side of the table, mid-point, close enough to the screen to read the numbers clearly and far enough from the presenting end to watch the room as well as the slides. The performance pack was already distributed, a bound set of slides at each place, the cover page carrying the month and the company’s name in a typeface that managed to communicate both precision and authority without quite demanding that you notice it.

Others filed in over the next ten minutes. The CFO, Anita Desai, arrived with the quiet efficiency she brought to all formal settings, setting her annotated copy of the pack on the table and spending the remaining minutes before the start reviewing something on her laptop with a focused stillness. The Chief Product Officer, Mark Reynolds, came in at three minutes past the hour, still carrying a conversation from the corridor, which he concluded with a brief nod before taking his seat. The others arranged themselves around the table in the loose hierarchy that had established itself over years of the same meeting in the same room.

Tim opened his copy of the pack and did not read it. He had read it the previous evening. Instead, he turned to the first page of numbers and held it in his peripheral vision while the room settled.

• • •

Anita opened the review in the manner she always did: concisely and in sequence. Revenue for the period was on plan to within a fraction of a point. Gross margin had held, reflecting the cost discipline that had been a consistent priority through the previous eighteen months. Operating expenditure was tracking slightly below budget, which she attributed to a combination of timing on three capital programmes and a reduction in discretionary spend that had been introduced quietly and had, just as quietly, held.

She moved through the slides with the economy of someone who had given this presentation enough times to know exactly how long each section needed. There were no pauses for effect. The numbers were presented as what they were: factual, current, confirmed. When she arrived at the forward-looking section, she noted that the forecast for the remainder of the year was intact and that the two risk items flagged in the previous cycle had both reduced. One had resolved. The other was being monitored.

The room received all of this with the composed attention of people for whom good news, properly delivered, was both welcome and expected. There were clarifying questions on two line items. One involved a timing difference on a deferred contract that Anita addressed in four sentences. The other was a query about a variance in one of the regional segments that turned out, on closer examination, to be an accounting reclassification rather than an operational shift. Both were resolved before the slide changed.

Tim listened to all of it and found nothing to dispute. The numbers were correct. He had checked them himself the previous evening, comparing them against the underlying data with the attentiveness he brought to anything that had recently begun to feel slightly different from how it had felt before. The numbers were correct, and they told the story they were designed to tell, which was a story of a company operating within its plan, meeting its commitments, and producing no cause for concern.

What they did not tell, and what he was not sure anyone in the room was thinking about, was what the numbers would look like if you were measuring the right things.

• • •

Mark presented the product line section forty minutes into the review. He had twelve slides and moved through the first ten without any deviation from the narrative Tim had already read the night before. The established product lines were performing to expectation. The pipeline was on track. Customer retention was holding at its historical level. Development milestones for the coming two quarters were green across the board.

The eleventh slide covered the precision controls line. It was presented as what it was: a segment performing slightly below the others in its category, trailing its own target by a margin that was, as Mark noted, within the acceptable range for the period. He used the phrase “within acceptable range” twice in the space of three minutes, and neither time did anyone in the room respond to it as a form of emphasis. It was received as a description, not a signal.

The reasons Mark offered were orderly and specific. A delayed customer programme in the northern European segment had pushed two contracts into the following quarter. A product update that had been scheduled for earlier in the year had been set back by six weeks due to resource constraints in the engineering function. A new pricing structure that had been introduced eighteen months earlier was still bedding in across certain customer segments. None of these were individually unusual. Collectively, they formed a tidy account of a line that was experiencing a temporary combination of timing and transition.

The discussion that followed lasted seven minutes. Two colleagues asked questions about the delayed contracts. Anita asked about the cost profile of the product update. Mark answered each question with the same precise competence he had brought to the rest of the presentation. By the end of the seven minutes, the consensus in the room was clear without anyone having stated it directly: the precision controls line had some things to address, was being managed appropriately, and would likely normalise in the following period.

Tim had not asked a question.

• • •

The review concluded at ten past eleven. The room emptied with the purposeful efficiency of people moving toward the rest of a full working day. Tim remained in his seat for a moment after the others had gone, the performance pack open in front of him at the product line section.

He had been to the exhibition six days ago. The physical fact of the hall was still retrievable in detail: the particular angle of the overhead lighting, the sound of conversations carrying across hard floors, the German firm’s display with its quiet reorientation toward integration and flow. The buyer from Scandinavia asking his question about what the change process looked like from MontaraTech’s side.

He looked at the precision controls numbers on the page in front of him. They were accurate. He did not doubt that. The delayed contracts were real, the product update had genuinely been set back, the pricing transition was genuinely ongoing. There was nothing in Mark’s account that he had any reason to question. The explanation was coherent and the conclusion was reasonable: a temporary combination of factors, within acceptable range, expected to normalise.

But the explanation was about the line itself. It was about what was happening inside MontaraTech’s own operations, its own schedules, its own pricing decisions. It was calibrated against the company’s own targets, measured against its own previous performance, judged as acceptable or not against its own historical range.

It did not say anything about what was happening outside.

The numbers showed where they were, not where they were heading. And the heading, Tim had come to understand somewhere between the exhibition hall and this room, was not simply a projection of the current position forward. It was something else. It was a question of whether the distance between MontaraTech and the field around it was holding, narrowing, or widening—and that question did not appear anywhere in the performance pack, because the performance pack had not been designed to answer it.

He turned back to the cover page. The company name. The period. The word “Performance”.

Performance was the right word for what the document contained. Every number in it described something the company had done or was doing—an output, a result, a rate of activity against a defined target. What it did not contain was any measure of what he would have called position. Where the company stood relative to the environment it was competing in. How that position was changing. Whether the organisation’s ability to stay ahead of that environment was improving, holding, or quietly eroding.

He did not think the people who had built the pack had been careless. He had worked with Anita long enough to know that she was not careless about anything. The document measured what organisations had agreed to measure over many decades of practice: revenues, margins, costs, targets, variances. It was entirely rational. It was entirely standard.

And it was, he was beginning to think, not quite enough.

• • •

He gathered his copy of the pack and straightened the pages against the table. He had a call at eleven-thirty and a pipeline review after lunch that would take most of the afternoon. The working day had its own momentum, and it was a momentum he had always respected. You did not stop the ordinary business of a company to pursue an unformed feeling.

But the feeling did not require him to stop anything. It only required him to hold it. To keep it present while the rest of the work continued, and to pay attention to what it collected around it over the coming weeks. He had learned to trust that process. Not every unease resolved into something definite. But the ones that did were almost always the ones he had held rather than dismissed.

He stood, took the performance pack, and paused at the door of the fishbowl. Through the glass he could see the atrium below, colleagues crossing it in the purposeful way of a working morning, the building operating at its normal pace. From this vantage it looked exactly as it always had. Ordered. Productive. A company doing what companies did.

He thought about the precision controls line and the seven minutes of discussion it had received and the consensus that it would normalise. He thought about the buyers at the exhibition asking their questions about adaptability and integration and change cycles. And it occurred to him, standing at the glass door with the performance pack under his arm, that the business was performing exactly as expected. Which was, in a way he could not yet fully resolve, precisely the problem.

He paused at the edge of MontaraTech’s stand and let the space settle around him before stepping into it. The stand was exactly as it had been specified. Clean lines, strong branding, the company’s core products arranged with the quiet confidence of things that had earned their position. The team was already in place—polished, prepared, rehearsed. Visitors were beginning to gather, and the first conversations were forming with the easy familiarity of an organisation that expected to be taken seriously.

He had attended this exhibition for eleven years. He could read a good year from the mood of the floor within an hour of arrival—a particular quality of attention from buyers, a sense that competitors were working harder than usual. He had learned not to trust euphoria in either direction. What mattered was what you noticed when you were paying attention to the right things.

He spent the morning doing what he always did. He walked the stand. He listened to conversations without interrupting them. He noted which products drew questions and which drew polite acknowledgement. He made no assessments before midday. The morning was for gathering.

The first thing he noticed was small, and he was not entirely sure he had noticed it at first. A buyer he had spoken with at two previous exhibitions—a procurement director from a mid-sized European manufacturer—paused longer than usual at one of the product demonstrations. Not longer in the sense of deep engagement; longer in the sense of someone who has seen the thing they came to see and is now waiting to be told something additional. He asked a question that Tim heard clearly across the stand.

“How quickly can the configuration be changed when the production requirement shifts?”

The product specialist gave a thorough answer, technically accurate and professionally delivered. Tim watched the buyer’s expression as he listened. There was no dissatisfaction in it. But there was also no particular relief. The answer had been received and filed, and the buyer had moved on to his next question before the first one had fully resolved.

Tim stayed with that exchange in his mind through the rest of the morning.

• • •

After lunch, he walked the hall. He did this every year, covering the full floor rather than watching from the vantage of the MontaraTech stand. It was the only way to see what was actually happening rather than what you expected to see.

The major competitors were arranged as they usually were—positioned with sufficient distance to suggest confidence, close enough to invite comparison. He studied each stand in the same deliberate way, moving at the pace of a buyer rather than an observer. He was looking for change, not just difference. Change implied something had shifted in the logic of how they competed.

Most of the products were, at their core, what he had expected. No dramatic leap. No disruptive technology placed at the front of a stand as if to announce that everything before it was obsolete. The engineering was solid. The specifications were familiar. In terms of performance against a fixed set of criteria, MontaraTech remained where it had always been—measured, credible, ahead of most.

But that was not quite the point anymore.

One competitor—a German firm that had historically operated in a different segment—had expanded its range. The expansion was not aggressive, but it was deliberate. Their stand was organised less around product and more around integration. The displays showed not what the product did in isolation, but how it connected. Connection to control systems, to data environments, to other components in a production line. The messaging was quiet and technically dense. It was not aimed at everyone. It was aimed at the people in the room who were already thinking about that problem.

Tim stood at a distance and watched who stopped at that stand. He recognised several faces he had also seen at MontaraTech’s that morning.

• • •

He spent the afternoon back on the MontaraTech stand, moving between conversations, picking up context without directing it. What he was paying attention to was the shape of the questions. In his experience, questions told you more about the direction of a market than any presentation or product comparison. What buyers asked revealed what problem they had actually come to solve.

For most of the last decade, the questions at this exhibition had been grounded in performance. Throughput. Precision. Reliability. Operating cost. Buyers came with specifications and wanted to know whether MontaraTech’s products could meet them. The conversation was essentially about proof of capability. The company had been very good at that conversation. It had built its position on it.

Today the questions were not wrong, exactly. Capability still mattered. But there was something else running beneath them. A purchasing manager from a Scandinavian industrial group spent twenty minutes at one of the product stations and asked, in total, four questions. The first two were familiar: throughput under variable load, maintenance intervals. The third was slightly different: whether the product’s software environment had been updated in the past eighteen months. The fourth was one Tim wrote down later from memory.

“If our operating requirements change significantly in two years—and they will—what does the change process look like from your side?”

It was not a hostile question. It was practical and entirely reasonable. But it assumed something that most of the previous decade’s conversations had not assumed. It assumed that the buyer’s world would keep changing and that the relevant question was not whether the product was good now, but how the relationship would function when the requirements shifted. It was a question about adaptability, not about specification.

MontaraTech’s product specialist had answered well—support pathways, upgrade cycles, the account team structure. It was a thorough response. The buyer had nodded and thanked him and moved along the stand to look at the next display.

Tim watched him go. He did not think the answer had been wrong. He thought the answer had been about a different question than the one the buyer had actually asked.

• • •

By the middle of the afternoon, the flow on the stand had settled into a steady rhythm. The team was performing well. Conversations were being held, business cards exchanged, follow-ups committed to. The surface of the day looked exactly as it should have looked. Tim had no cause to intervene in any of it.

He stepped back to the edge of the stand and let the hall do what he had come here to let it do.

The exhibition floor at this hour had a particular quality of light. The overhead rigs had been dialled up as the afternoon moved toward early evening, compensating for the drop in natural light from the hall’s high windows. Everything looked precise and deliberate. The stands were lit to make things appear at their best. But light at that intensity also flattened the differences between things. From a certain distance, the products on every stand looked essentially similar: engineered, well-made, competently presented.

MontaraTech’s products were not the same as its competitors’ products. He knew that with precision. The materials, the tolerances, the manufacturing process, the depth of the engineering behind each unit—these were not equivalent. The differences were real and they were measurable. That had never been the question.

But he was aware, standing at the edge of the stand watching the floor, that the differences were less visible than they had been. Not because MontaraTech had fallen back. Because the field around it had moved forward. The distance had not disappeared. It had narrowed, quietly and without announcement, and the result was that the conversations happening at MontaraTech’s stand and the conversations happening at the competitors’ stands were beginning to sound more similar than they once had.

He had been in this industry long enough to know what that meant. It was not a crisis. There was no emergency signal, no single event he could take to the leadership team as evidence that something had gone wrong. Nothing had gone wrong in any definitive sense. The company was still ahead. The numbers would reflect a perfectly acceptable year. The board meeting in two weeks would open with a performance summary that any other year he would have found straightforwardly reassuring.

And yet.

Something about the day had left him with a feeling he did not entirely want and could not yet properly name. It was the feeling of watching something shift in the periphery—not enough to confirm, not subtle enough to dismiss. The buyers were asking different questions. The competitors were framing their products differently. The hall looked the same and sounded the same and would read as the same in any formal report. But it did not feel the same.

He thought of a conversation he’d had years ago with the commercial director of a company that had, within eighteen months, lost a category position it had held for two decades. The man had described it afterwards with a particular precision. He had said that the problem was never visible as failure. It was visible as the loss of distance. The gap between them and the rest of the field had narrowed so gradually that no single reporting period had flagged it. By the time the numbers looked difficult, the structural reality had already been decided.

Tim had thought about that sentence many times over the years. He had always applied it to other companies, other industries. To organisations that had stopped paying attention.

He stepped further back from the stand and looked across the full width of the hall. MontaraTech was well-positioned, well-lit, professionally staffed. Its products were strong. Its people knew what they were doing. The company was, by any measure available to him, still performing.

He picked up his phone and opened his notes. He did not write a report. He wrote three words, and then stopped, and looked at them for a moment before putting the phone away. Being ahead wasn’t enough. He did not know yet what to do with that. But he knew it was true, and he knew it had not been true in quite the same way the last time he had stood in this hall. That felt important. He was not certain why.

Background to this story

We live in an era where competitive advantage evaporates faster than ever.

Strategies that once lasted a decade now feel fragile within a year. Emerging competitors can replicate products, processes and even cultures at unprecedented speed. AI accelerates learning and execution cycles. Markets shift overnight.

And yet, many organisations are still built for yesterday’s context, anchored in governance, incentives, and architectures optimised for a world that no longer exists. The results? Brilliant strategies stall. Leaders get frustrated. Teams quietly slip back into old rhythms.

I’ve seen it firsthand.

In global consulting, across industries and geographies, I’ve worked with executives who had the right vision and compelling plans, but whose systems, structures, and flows simply weren’t ready to deliver.

It’s not a lack of ambition. It’s not even resistance to change, it’s a readiness gap.

That’s why The Fifth Lever exists.

It’s a story, and every scene draws on real transformation patterns I’ve witnessed in my MBA studies, my current DBA research into Maintained Competitive Advantage, and years advising CIOs and boards, most recently in my role with a global consulting firm.

Through Sara’s journey, you’ll see the hidden forces that make or break a strategy in motion:

• The inertia of legacy architectures

• The slow drag of outdated processes

• The quiet urgency of leaders who know they can’t wait for the “perfect moment” to act

For you, reader, this is the right book at the right time because:

• The pace of change is unforgiving. Waiting for stability is no longer a viable strategy.

• Execution is now the competitive frontier. Everyone has access to ideas; few can translate them into sustained results.

• Fiction can reach where frameworks can’t. We remember stories, and we act on them.

You should care because if your organisation isn’t deliberately designed to deliver your current strategy and adapt to the next one, you’re already losing ground; you just can’t see it yet.

This is a novel. And it’s also a lens.

And once you’ve seen what’s really holding strategy back, you can’t unsee it.