South Africa, Oct. 20 -- This failure is rooted in what Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton call the "Knowing-Doing Gap." Prevalent in most corporate cultures, "strategy" carries a certain prestige, and "execution" is treated as operational overhead - necessary but not integral. The work of 'deciding' is visible, high-status, and rewarded, but the work of 'doing' is fragmented, undervalued, and too often not even considered by those who approved the plan. This asymmetry is not merely unfair; it is structurally guaranteed to produce an Execution Gap time and again, which ultimately becomes an expensive operational failure. Design, conversely, forces "definition".

As DUO strategy lead, Shey Nel emphasises, true strategic ...