Strategy & Execution
Beyond the ivory tower: how to build strategies that actually work
Strategy looks clean in the boardroom and breaks on the floor. Six years in consulting, an MBA and a fulfilment site of 150 people taught me why — and what closes the gap.
Before my MBA I spent six years as a management consultant at Deloitte. Strategy there felt beautifully clean: crafted in sleek conference rooms, backed by financial projections, mapped out on whiteboards. The frameworks were elegant, the maths made sense and, on paper, the path to profitability was clear.
Then came deployment. Time and again I watched meticulously planned strategies grind to a halt the moment they reached the ground floor. Not because the strategy was wrong, but because we had failed to account for the human reality of daily operations.
What the warehouse floor taught me
To broaden my perspective I pursued an MBA at IESE Business School in Barcelona. Studying alongside a globally diverse cohort reinforced an essential lesson: every market, culture and business operates with its own operational nuances, and no single boardroom template fits all.
Equipped with that outlook I joined Amazon through the Pathways Leadership Program, which put me straight onto the front line — leading a fulfilment site end to end as an Operations Manager, overseeing more than 150 associates.
In my first week I went through Amazon's Associate Experience Week, where every new manager spends a full week on the warehouse floor doing the exact physical jobs the team does every day. Wearing safety shoes, scanning items and walking miles across the floor changed everything for me.
Standing beside the associates, I saw the invisible friction a dashboard never shows. A tiny design flaw that looked like a five per cent efficiency gain on a whiteboard actually added ten extra steps, frustrated the worker, created a physical bottleneck and pushed the team into off-the-books workarounds simply to hit end-of-day targets.
What to do with this
A strategy designed in isolation is just an expensive wish.
Why good plans quietly fail
If you own or run a small or medium-sized business you have likely felt this frustration. You buy new software, mandate a new standard operating procedure or reallocate duties to protect margin. Six months later nobody is using the software, the team is burned out and margins have not moved.
Three failure patterns account for most of it.
The efficiency fallacy
Optimising without stepping onto the floor cuts steps that look redundant on paper but are essential to the team's daily flow.
The bureaucracy trap
Rigid procedures fail the moment an unexpected real-world problem appears. If the process does not account for reality, the team will quietly abandon it.
The adoption barrier
People do not resist change. They resist being changed without their input.
Three pillars that make change stick
To bridge the gap between intent and execution, I use a deliberately simple approach to operational change.
Operational immersion
Before changing a process, spend a day doing it yourself alongside the team. You will spot the real bottlenecks in hours rather than months.
Co-creation
Do not hand down a new rule. Bring the people who execute the work into the room and ask where it will break. They will find the flaws before you spend money testing them.
Agile feedback loops
Treat every strategy as a living draft. Set up quick, regular check-ins where the team can safely say what is working and what is causing friction.
What to do with this
Leading European onboarding programmes for Amazon Shipping later, this mindset let us scale complex cross-border logistics without losing operational quality.
How this shapes the way we acquire
Strategic rigour from Deloitte, global perspective from IESE and ground-level operational mastery from Amazon form the foundation of how my business partner and I approach acquiring and growing companies.
When we partner with or acquire a business we do not arrive with top-down mandates or ivory-tower playbooks. We step onto the shop floor, put on the boots, listen to the front-line teams and work alongside them to remove the hidden friction holding them back. Strategic vision paired with genuine operational empathy is what unlocks a new level of sustainable performance — for the team as much as the owner.
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