Why good strategy fails: The governance blind spot in Singapore’s boardrooms

Good governance isn’t just about compliance—it’s about ensuring the ongoing viability of the business.

In Singapore’s dynamic business environment, where strategic foresight is often seen as a hallmark of success, it may come as a surprise that many well-crafted business strategies never see the light of day. 

Despite the resources poured into strategic planning, execution continues to be the Achilles’ heel for many organisations. The reason? A persistent governance blind spot. 

Governance is often misunderstood as just a compliance exercise—a box to check or a report to file. But true governance is also about strategic stewardship, ensuring the long-term viability of the business. 

That means effective planning and efficient execution. The latter involves internal alignment, enforcing accountability, and building cultural integrity to translate vision into reality. Without successful execution, strategy is just wishful thinking. 

After more than two decades of facilitating organisations across sectors, I’ve seen a recurring syndrome I call “SPOTS”—Strategic Plans sitting On The Shelf, gathering dust. These plans, whilst beautifully written, end up as showpieces for stakeholders, regulators, or websites. 

They lack practical use and, more importantly, organisational buy-in. They don’t fail because they’re poorly conceived, but because they are poorly governed. 

In Singapore, this issue is particularly acute in companies that treat strategic planning as a ceremonial activity rather than a leadership responsibility. 

There’s often a disconnect between the board and management, or between management and staff. A board may set ambitious goals without understanding the operational capacity required to achieve them. Or top management may cascade vague strategies to staff with little guidance on what execution actually entails. 

This breakdown is not just a communication issue—it’s a governance one. 

A robust governance system ensures that strategic intent is translated into clear, actionable plans at every level of the organisation. It mandates that strategy is not just communicated, but also cascaded—with resources, responsibilities, and results clearly defined. Without such a structure, execution becomes inconsistent, and the strategy loses momentum. 

Yet governance isn’t only about structure—it’s about culture. A strategy to innovate will fail in a culture that punishes risk. A strategy to enhance accountability will falter if political games dominate decision-making. Governance must, therefore, include not just frameworks and processes but also the softer aspects of organisational life: leadership behaviours, trust, and the emotional buy-in of teams. 

Consider SingPost’s digital transformation. In response to the declining traditional mail business, SingPost repositioned itself as a technology-driven logistics and e-commerce provider. This included significant investments in automation, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and enterprise resource planning systems.

However, execution was fragmented, and the company ultimately lost ground to regional challengers like Ninja Van and J&T Express. This failure can be attributed to lack of centralised oversight, inadequate stakeholder management, and deficient risk management.

Such failings have to do with poor implementation, not the quality of the strategy. They are governance issues, not a lack of vision. A bold, well-crafted, and well-funded strategy will falter without a strong governance backbone to carry it through. 

In contrast, organisations that execute strategy effectively demonstrate a common set of governance principles. They see governance not as bureaucracy but as a strategic enabler. Boards take ownership not only of approving strategy, but also of overseeing its delivery. 

They ask difficult questions: What’s the implementation plan? Who’s accountable? How will we track success? 

A bank in a neighbouring country I worked with recently had problems with implementing its previous strategic plan. It looked like a very good strategic plan, with seemingly great strategy statements and detailed plans. 

However, they either could not make headway with some strategies or could not agree whether they were successfully implemented or not. In any case, the results expected from the strategies were not seen. 

When I worked with them, I found that they had no agreed-upon way of measuring success and holding people accountable. Success of strategy implementation was left to the strategy owners to declare – that is not good governance. 

Good governance requires that objective measures of success (what we call Key Success Measures) for corporate goals and strategies must be decided upon and approved at the highest level. And it is with these Key Success Measures that the board will hold the management collectively accountable, and the top management will hold individual executives accountable. Without such accountability, strategies do not get properly and fully implemented. 

Another major governance issue they had was the absence of a central project management office that acts for and on behalf of the CEO to drive the day-to-day efforts in strategy implementation. 

This is one of the crucial elements of governance to ensure effective implementation. Without this central office and the full authority of the CEO behind the office, they will have a really hard time creating and sustaining momentum for implementation.

These were the first two issues that needed to be dealt with to make sure that the new strategic plan we were developing would become a reality. There were more governance issues, but I highlight these two because they are very common – I see them again and again in client organisations, and the consequences are huge. 

They also invest in both the hard and soft enablers of governance. Hard enablers include clear performance frameworks, scorecards, and cross-functional accountability structures. Soft enablers include leadership alignment, culture-building, and a relentless focus on “what’s in it for me?” at every level. 

Finally, they stay adaptable. In today’s VUCA world—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—strategy must be capable of evolving mid-flight. 

Good governance requires a built-in system of strategic management that ensures that the organisation can and will adjust course proactively in response to change in the business environment. And they must do it without losing momentum. 

To sum up, when strategies fail, the cause is rarely the lack of vision. It’s the lack of governance. 

Good governance isn’t just about compliance—it’s about ensuring the ongoing viability of the business. That means realising great vision and sound strategy, turning it all into reality with clarity, courage, and consistency.