LCG 09 Execution Tax Workbook (English Edition)

Is your leadership team aligned - or just acting like it?

Every leadership team believes it is aligned. Most are wrong more often than they think. Not because people are dishonest, but because disagreeing in a meeting has a social cost. So it stays in the room, and afterwards each leader goes out and does what their own targets pull them towards. We call that bill the execution tax. Can you answer these five?

1. Of the last 10 decisions we agreed on - how many were carried out as agreed?

The famous claim that 67-90% of strategies fail in execution is actually disputed. A peer-reviewed review (Cândido & Santos, 2015) shows nobody knows the real figure. That is exactly why almost no board measures it. The workbook gives you a way to do it.

2. Do our incentives reward the collaboration we say we want?

In a merger across four countries, the leadership team agreed on a joint strategy - and went back to national execution as soon as the meeting ended. Each country head was still measured on their own P&L. After several years the whole division was outsourced. The workbook shows how to redesign the incentives.

3. Do people dare to say bad news out loud here?

A peer-reviewed study of Nokia (Vuori & Huy, Administrative Science Quarterly, 2016), based on 76 interviews, shows how fear in both directions kept bad news about the software away from the top. Market value fell by around 90%. The workbook has a ready-made template for building the trust it takes.

4. Does the board talk about the culture the strategy requires?

According to EY, 27% of boards never or rarely do. Efforts run as a project rather than as standing governance typically slide back within 18-24 months. The workbook gives the board a model and the questions it is missing.

5. Are decision rights in place before we grow - including abroad?

Target opened 133 stores in Canada in 2013, run from headquarters in the US, and local teams could see the errors without being allowed to fix them. In January 2015 Target Canada filed for creditor protection without ever having made money. The workbook has a full chapter on designing decision rights before you scale.

What you get: 13 chapters, an Execution Tax score across four categories (decision rights, trust and psychological safety, incentives and structure, governance and oversight), a readiness assessment that tells you where to start, the RAPID model, ten practices and an execution health model for the board. Every figure is marked by strength of evidence, so it holds up in front of a critical CFO.

It is for boards and executive teams in companies with 50-500 employees where the strategy is agreed but the results aren't following.

Why not just ask ChatGPT? ChatGPT can give good advice on execution. It can't see whether the agreement in your leadership team survives the meeting. The workbook gives you a score and points to the chapter to start with.

Try it free first: Take the free Execution Tax self-assessment on the website and get your Execution Tax Statement. The workbook takes it from there.

Individual Licence: Single User, No AI Rights

This licence grants one named individual a personal, non-transferable right to download and use this workbook for their own professional development and reference.

The licence does not permit uploading, importing, integrating or using the workbook as source material in AI agents, large language models (LLMs), RAG systems or other AI-enabled platforms. Sharing, redistribution and organisational use are not permitted under this individual licence.

Use with AI agents requires a separate, valid LCG corporate AI licence. All intellectual property rights remain with Leadership Capital Group (LCG).

LCG-INDIVIDUAL-LICENCE-TERMS