Most pages of strategy statistics recycle each other. A number gets detached from its study, rounds itself off in transit, and ten blogs later "up to 90% of strategies fail" is cited to no source at all. This page does it differently. Every statistic below links to the primary research it comes from, with the sample size where the study reports one, and the last section lists the famous numbers you should treat with care because nobody can trace them to actual data. Cite anything here freely, with a link back to this page or, better, to the original study.
How often does strategy execution fail?
The honest headline: rigorous studies do not support a single failure rate, but they consistently find a large gap between what strategies promise and what organizations deliver.
Companies deliver on average only 63% of the financial performance their strategies promise, according to a survey of senior executives at 197 companies by Marakon Associates, published by Michael Mankins and Richard Steele in Harvard Business Review, 2005.
61% of senior executives say their organizations struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and day-to-day implementation, in an Economist Intelligence Unit survey of 587 executives sponsored by PMI. The same survey found 88% call executing strategic initiatives essential or very important to competitiveness, and just over half report their strategic initiatives actually succeed.
Only 10% of organizations achieve at least two-thirds of their strategic objectives, per Bridges Business Consultancy's long-running implementation survey (20-year results). 54% achieve less than half of them, and only about one in five organizations reviews execution monthly.
The alignment and communication numbers
Execution fails quietly, in the distance between what leadership decided and what the organization knows. The research here is the most striking of the lot.
On average, 95% of a company's employees are unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy, per Robert Kaplan and David Norton's research in Harvard Business Review, 2005.
Only 55% of middle managers can name even one of their company's top five priorities, from a survey of 7,600 managers in 262 companies across 30 industries by Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull (Harvard Business Review, 2015). The same study found only 9% of managers say they can rely on colleagues in other functions and units all the time, which is why the authors argue execution breaks down horizontally, across silos, more than vertically.
Only about half of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work, a figure Gallup has tracked for decades through its Q12 engagement research (Gallup). Gallup's analysis also finds that improving expectation clarity alone can lift profitability by 9% and work quality by 11%, and that employees whose manager helps them set performance goals are roughly eight times more likely to be engaged.
Knowledge workers spend 58% of their day on "work about work", meaning status updates, chasing information, and coordination rather than the skilled work itself, per Asana's Anatomy of Work Global Index of 9,615 knowledge workers across six countries. Status reporting about the work has become a larger job than moving it.
What poor execution costs
Organizations waste 9.9% of every dollar invested in projects through poor performance, per PMI's global Pulse of the Profession 2018 survey. PMI framed the global total as roughly $1 million wasted every 20 seconds, about $2 trillion a year.
Organizations that undervalue project delivery as a strategic competency report 67% more of their projects failing outright, from the same PMI research.
What actually improves goal achievement
The failure statistics get the headlines, but the research on what works is just as concrete.
Specific, difficult goals produce reliably higher performance than vague or "do your best" goals, one of the most replicated findings in organizational psychology, holding across more than 400 studies over 35 years, per Edwin Locke and Gary Latham's goal-setting research (Locke and Latham, 2002).
76% of people who wrote down their goals, committed to actions, and sent weekly progress reports to a friend achieved their goals or got more than halfway, versus 35% of those who merely thought about them, in Dr. Gail Matthews' study of 267 recruited participants at Dominican University (research summary). Accountability and a written commitment roughly doubled the outcome.
At Google, the expected average score for OKRs is 0.6 to 0.7 out of 1.0, and consistently hitting 1.0 is read as sandbagging rather than success, per John Doerr's grading guidance at What Matters. Ambition is designed into the system; a fully green scorecard is a warning sign, not a triumph. That is the same logic behind the green dashboard problem: a status that is always green tells you about the reporting culture, not the work.
The famous numbers you should treat with care
Some of the most-quoted strategy statistics do not survive a trip to the library.
"70% of strategies fail" and "90% of strategies fail" circulate in thousands of articles, usually attributed vaguely to Harvard or to Kaplan and Norton. Carlos Cândido and Sérgio Santos reviewed the evidence trail in the Journal of Management & Organization, 2015 and concluded that most published failure-rate estimates are based on evidence that is outdated, fragmentary, fragile, or simply absent. A failure rate that spans 50 to 90 percent depending on who is quoting it is a rumor with a percentage sign.
"85% of executive teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy" is widely attributed to Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard work, but the underlying dataset is difficult to trace. Use the sourced 95% employee-awareness figure instead.
The pattern behind the folklore is worth naming: failure rates flatter anyone selling a fix. The verifiable research above is less dramatic and more useful, because it points at specific, addressable breakdowns - priorities managers cannot name, statuses typed instead of derived, cross-team dependencies nobody owns - rather than a doom percentage. Closing that gap between the plan and the work is the whole design brief behind strategy execution as a category, and the strategy execution gap has its own entry in our glossary.
How to cite these statistics
Link the original study, name the year and the sample, and prefer the precise claim over the round one: "only 55% of middle managers could name even one of their company's top five priorities (Sull, Homkes and Sull, HBR 2015, n=7,600)" will survive an editor; "most managers don't know the strategy" will not. Everything on this page is free to reference with attribution. If a number you have seen elsewhere is missing here, it is likely in the folklore section for a reason, but tell us if we missed a study worth adding, and we will update the page.
FAQ
What percentage of strategies fail to execute? No rigorous single number exists, and the widely quoted 70% and 90% failure rates cannot be traced to solid studies. What the research does show: companies deliver on average 63% of the financial performance their strategies promise (Mankins and Steele, HBR 2005), only 10% of organizations achieve at least two-thirds of their strategic objectives (Bridges), and 61% of executives admit their firms struggle to connect strategy to day-to-day implementation (Economist Intelligence Unit).
Why does strategy execution fail? The sourced research points to information and coordination breakdowns rather than bad plans. 95% of employees are unaware of or do not understand their company's strategy (Kaplan and Norton), only 55% of middle managers can name even one of the top five priorities, and just 9% of managers can rely on other units all the time (Sull, Homkes and Sull). The plan exists; the connection between the plan and the daily work does not.
Do written goals really improve achievement? Yes, and the effect is large. In the Dominican University study, 76% of participants who wrote goals and sent weekly progress reports to a friend achieved them or got more than halfway, versus 35% who only thought about their goals. Locke and Latham's research across more than 400 studies shows specific, difficult goals reliably outperform vague ones.