Christian Dippel and Tony Frost are associate professors of business, economics and public policy at Western University’s Ivey Business School.
For the past quarter-century, one of the most widely shared beliefs in management has been deceptively simple: execution trumps strategy. Strategy decks are easy, the saying goes. What’s hard – and what separates winners from also-rans – is getting things done.
This proposition shaped a generation of leadership development, performance management and executive promotion. We believe it was largely true for the era in which it took hold, but it is fast becoming false in the era we are now entering.
The reason is that artificial intelligence is inverting the underlying economics of competitive advantage – and with it, of managerial work. The rapidly advancing capabilities of AI tools mean that functional execution is becoming less costly and more evenly distributed across firms. Going forward, the key differentiators – across firms and managers alike – will be strategic coherence and clarity.
Over the past three decades, more and more of the value-adding work in knowledge-intensive organizations has migrated onto a digital substrate. Analysis, modeling, communication and decision-making increasingly happen through software.
So does the customer relationship itself: every company of consequence now interfaces with its customers digitally, often as the primary channel. The share of execution that flows through information and software has grown enormously, and that is precisely the layer AI is now collapsing in cost. Work such as a draft report, a financial model or a coded prototype that used to take a week now take an afternoon.
The temptation, predictably, is to do more – more of everything. Initiatives proliferate. Decks, dashboards and reports multiply faster than most organizations can absorb them; features and options multiply faster than most customers can use them.
The discipline of focus – saying yes to a small number of things that actually matter and no to a much larger number of plausible-looking ones – gets harder, not easier, as the volume of alternatives expands. And the value of that discipline rises in step: harder to supply, more needed than ever.
This is not just a story about strategy at the top of the firm. It is reshaping what makes individual managers valuable, and doing so faster than most career trajectories typically evolve. For decades, the path to managerial value ran through functional depth – building expertise in finance, marketing, operations, engineering or legal – and a strategic perspective was the late-career capstone for those rising into senior roles. AI is now compressing that timeline.
The functional tasks that once differentiated early-career professionals are exactly the ones AI augments most powerfully. The capacities that used to be optional until you ran a business unit – connecting your work to enterprise outcomes, seeing how the firm wins as an integrated whole, communicating priorities sharply enough that others can act on them – are becoming the baseline for managers throughout the ranks.
Two capacities matter most. The first is strategic coherence. Managers need an integrated understanding of how their firm actually wins – how the customers it has chosen, the value it offers, the way it makes money and the capabilities it is building fit together into a holistic way of competing.
They check that understanding against two external realities: where the market is moving and what the firm can actually do well. Coherence is not a picture a manager forms once and keeps; it is one they keep developing as conditions, evidence and outcomes accumulate. The manager with a coherent view of strategy reads a proposal or an initiative through that lens and can tell quickly whether it fits the larger game the firm is playing or merely looks like a good idea in isolation.
The second is strategic clarity. Clarity has two faces. The first is inward: the manager’s own grasp of the firm’s strategic logic, sharp enough to function as a working filter for daily judgment rather than something invoked only at offsites. The second is outward: the ability to communicate that logic to others – teams, peers, partners and increasingly the AI tools the manager is directing – sharply enough that they can connect their own work to it.
The cost of fuzzy direction is rising as more and more execution is mediated through specifications, briefs and prompts that compress strategic intent into actionable form. AI tools execute on whatever direction is set; when the direction is fuzzy, they produce fast, confident motion that can look right but often isn’t.
This is not a vindication of generalists over specialists, and it would be a mistake to read it as another swing of the specialist-versus-generalist pendulum. AI rewards neither strategy-without-domain knowledge nor depth-without-direction. What it rewards is the combination: managers who bring genuine functional depth and the coherence and clarity to see how their work connects to the larger game their firm is playing.
Strategists have long observed that competitive advantage comes from capabilities that are both valuable and rare. Something similar is true of careers. For decades, deep functional expertise was both. AI is now eroding that truth.
What is becoming rarer, and more valuable, is the discipline of holding a direction against the proliferation of plausible alternatives – the capacity to develop and keep current a coherent picture of how a firm wins and to communicate it clearly enough that an organization and the tools it now wields, can act on it together.
For managers, especially those early in their careers, this is where learning and developmental attention should go.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.