Why Strategy Needs Mobilization, Especially in This Moment

▶ Watch on YouTube · McKinsey & Company · 31:47

As strategy rises to the top of executive agendas, many organizations are struggling to translate bold strategic choices into sustained performance.

In this episode of Inside the Strategy Room, the global co-leaders of McKinsey’s Strategy and Corporate Finance Practice, Sébastien Lacroix and Andy West, along with Whitney Zimmerman, a distinguished expert in strategy, discuss why mobilization has become the critical differentiator between strategy success and failure, and how leaders can build the capabilities needed to turn strategy into action in an era of intensified competition, ever-accelerating change, and uncertainty.

TL;DR

A ~32-minute episode of Inside the Strategy Room on the McKinsey & Company channel, published 8 September 2026. Host Sean Brown talks with Andy West and Sébastien Lacroix, global co-leaders of McKinsey’s Strategy and Corporate Finance Practice, and Whitney Zimmerman, a distinguished expert in strategy. The three co-wrote the July 2026 HBR article How to Ensure Your Company Acts on Your New Strategy. The research also feeds Strategy and Value, a forthcoming book by West, Zimmerman and Tim Koller.

The claim in one sentence: between strategy and execution there is a third, separate piece of work, called mobilization, and it is what most distinguishes the companies that climb McKinsey’s power curve.

1. Why strategy is back on the agenda. West calls the moment “an unfreezing moment”. Geopolitics, AI, supply-chain uncertainty and inflation have piled up until leaders “are kind of ready to act”. But acting needs “some level of conviction”.
2. Competition is changing faster, and it comes from outside the industry. Lacroix’s case is French retail banking. In a country of about 65 million people, new entrants (digital banks, insurers, telcos, tech firms, car makers offering finance and leasing) gained 15 million clients in five years, while traditional banks with 90% market share lost 2 million. When the shuffle rate is high, “it can be harder to think long term”. West’s recommendation is to bring market dynamics into every decision forum. In his experience “100% of the time it actually changes your decision-making.”
3. The competitive-advantage blind spot. In a McKinsey survey of about 1,000 companies, about 57–60% said they were confident or highly confident they knew their source of competitive advantage, and only 10% had data that tracked its drivers at market level. West’s anecdote: ask ten senior executives at the same company about their advantage and “I will get at least three fundamentally different yet equally emphatic answers.” His chain of reasoning: “If you don’t know it and you’re not aligned on it, you’re not managing it. And if you’re not managing it, you’re not retaining the competitive integrity.”
4. When the advantage erodes: first hold, then move, and pay for the move with cash. West’s first rule is to keep what you have: “the easiest and number one thing you can do is retain your advantage.” If it has become commonplace (“because of technology or industry structure or market entry or AI native organizations”) or cannot be carried into the market you need to reach, the move takes “two or three chess moves”. Cash is “one of the most temporary and most liquid forms of competitive advantage”. A large firm can buy its way through the migration, whether by M&A or by deliberate reallocation. Why this is hard: “It’s really hard for any Monday to show up and say today’s the day we’re going to start unfunding a going concern with lots of employees and lots of political capital… and fund a new one. That’s why it’s a strategy question.”
5. Three vectors for AI strategy. Lacroix treats AI as a strategic inflection point. (a) Productivity “to stay in the game”: automation and workflow redesign. (b) Innovation to expand and defend profit pools, such as hyper-personalisation and AI-enabled products. (c) Deliberate choices to shape new market structures: disintermediation, new value chains. The firms that do best understand how the drivers of return in their markets may shift. That means going “one, two layers deeper”: whether differentiation can be protected, whether customer fragmentation will change, whether new platforms will appear. It goes beyond market growth and historic returns.
6. AI as an instrument for seeing advantage, and the market already sees the erosion. Competitive advantage “is usually a pretty weak signal”, and “AI is great at weak signals… AI is great at synthesis.” McKinsey spent a year building AI tools to see advantage company by company. It then ran an outside-in teardown of 50 industrial companies, combining each company’s sources of advantage with its sources of disruption. About 25% had advantage that was being meaningfully eroded. Of the companies analysed, nine in ten had that erosion priced into their share price: strong current fundamentals (out-earning peers), but terminal-value growth priced “at or below GDP”. “The market is saying this is good today, but… it’s not good tomorrow.” The cure West prescribes is investor communication backed by proof points.
7. Strategy quality is falling. McKinsey scores strategies against its “10 tests” (the first: will your strategy beat the market?). The share of executives who say their strategy passes four or more of the ten fell from 35% in 2010 to 21% in 2024, “a 40% drop”. Lacroix attributes this to context, not to worse executives: the speed of change, the volume of information, and the demand to allocate capital “in a new frame of mind” while resisting one’s own biases.
8. The power curve is getting steeper. McKinsey measures strategic outcomes with a power curve, the distribution of economic profit across companies. “You don’t move this curve by accident.” Big strategic moves make climbing it more likely, and “the winners have been becoming bigger winners and the losers have been failing harder.” The concrete finding: companies that climbed the curve invested on average about twice as much as their competitors in a given area. Typical year-on-year budgeting moves allocations by “a few points” and never produces a shift of that size.
9. The missing link: mobilization. Zimmerman: “You can’t, in our view, simply go from strategy to execution… you need to mobilize.” Mobilization means discrete activities that “demand top team attention”. It covers putting strategic initiatives in executives’ hands, doing enough planning beneath each choice, reallocating resources (“talent, capital, agentic budget”) towards strategy and away from what does not matter, and making sure those commitments reach budgets and plans. McKinsey compared companies that rose into and stayed in the top 20% of the power curve over five years with those that fell to the bottom. The climbers were stronger at design, mobilization and execution, and “most differentiated by their ability to mobilize.” Her framing comes from Andrew Marshall, the Cold War strategist: “Your strategy can only influence your competitors if it survives your system first.”
10. A standard for strategy, because vague strategy cannot be mobilized. Zimmerman sets out four requirements. (a) A clear value-creation thesis: what future you believe in, which advantage you build on, how the choices fit together. It should be clear enough that someone who hears only the thesis can make their own choices that fit the strategy. (b) Every choice is a true choice that becomes one or a few strategic initiatives owned by an executive. “Not just ‘we’re going to digitize’… strategy is not done till it becomes one.” (c) The choices form a portfolio across horizons of value and levels of risk. That lets a team step back and say, “we actually aren’t happy with the extent to which we’re leaning into uncertainty.” (d) Name the trade-offs early. “If you’re not naming what’s going to stop… you’re probably not going to stop things.” She cites Jobs and Cook on saying no to thousands of things. Stopping things also makes the commitments credible.
11. Two biases that “cut mobilization off at the knees”. (a) Anchoring to last year’s budget. The fix: make year one of the strategic financial plan the first draft of next year’s budget. Last year’s budget should not be that draft, and “very often the first year of that strategic financial plan is totally forgotten.” (b) Evaluating bold moves one at a time. Loss aversion makes executives risk-averse when judging each initiative on its own. The fix is to stack-rank bold moves against everything else being funded, as one portfolio.
12. Mobilization as an institutional capability. At its strongest, mobilization is invisible: “when you make a strategic choice in the business, everyone knows what happens next. And you don’t need to explicitly mobilize.” Building it starts with vocabulary. A CEO told Zimmerman he had only ever thought of strategy vs execution and grew “very impatient” when execution didn’t happen. Then comes treating it as a long-term investment, visible in “culture… operating model”.
13. A system that reinforces itself. In the closing answer, test-learn-adapt, mobilization and a high strategy standard reinforce each other. Firms good at testing and adapting are “significantly more likely to be great at mobilization, because you have to mobilize to learn”. Firms good at mobilizing are “significantly more likely” to hold strategy to a high standard.

What was actually ingested

The full auto-generated (ASR) English caption track: 314 segments, ending at 31:38 of a 31:47 runtime. All 12 chapter markers are present and distributed correctly. Speaker turns are unlabelled, but Brown names each guest at handover, so attribution is clear throughout. The show’s standard sign-off is excluded. Neither the HBR article nor the book Strategy and Value is ingested. Every statistic here is how the guests describe that research aloud.

Dynamic-capabilities tagging

• digital-sensing/digital-scouting: West describes AI tools built “to see competitive advantage for individual companies” from outside, because advantage “is usually a pretty weak signal”. The 50-company teardown combining sources of advantage with sources of disruption is the worked instance.
• digital-seizing/balancing-digital-portfolios: this is the episode’s centre of gravity. Climbers put about twice their competitors’ capital into selected priorities; choices should form a portfolio across horizons of value and levels of risk; bold moves should be stack-ranked against everything else being funded rather than judged one at a time; and the resources to reallocate include an “agentic budget”.
• digital-seizing/strategic-agility: mobilization as an institutional capability (“everyone knows what happens next”), and the closing claim that test-learn-adapt and mobilization reinforce each other, because “you have to mobilize to learn”.
• strategic-renewal/business-model: Lacroix’s third AI vector, deliberate choices to shape new market structures (disintermediation, new value chains), and West’s account of migrating to a new industry by buying the capabilities a firm lacks.
• contextual/external-triggers: new entrants from outside the industry capturing share in French banking, a rising shuffle rate, and geopolitics, AI, supply-chain uncertainty and inflation as the combined trigger for the current strategy moment.
• contextual/internal-barriers: the episode names specific barriers: anchoring to last year’s budget, loss aversion when bold moves are evaluated singly, and the political capital of “a going concern with lots of employees” that makes unfunding it hard.

Linked entities and concepts

• McKinsey & Company: publisher. The second Inside the Strategy Room episode in the wiki. Updated in this ingest.
• Sean Brown: host. Promoted to an entity page in this ingest, on his second appearance.
• Banholzer & LaBerge: the same show and research programme a month earlier, on seeing advantage rather than acting on it.
• MGI, The race takes off: the Power Curve research on capital allocation from MGI’s side.
• Martin 2022: what separates a strategy from a plan, set against Zimmerman’s four-part standard.
• Erginbilgiç: granular strategy, where everyone knows their role, set against choices that become owned initiatives.
• Ellmer & Dhar: false alignment in executive teams.
• Krishna: concentrating resources on a few priorities.
• McGrath: a strategic center’s “permissionless action” and its capital-allocation job, set against Zimmerman’s value-creation thesis and West on unfunding a going concern.
• Catlin: the same firm on the “metabolic rate of learning” and on the organisational lens as the hardest; compare Zimmerman’s “you have to mobilize to learn”. Not independent evidence.
• strategy: mobilization as the step between strategy and execution, the strategy standard, the falling 10-test pass rate, and the two biases.
• dynamic-capabilities: mobilization as a named, measured instance of Teece’s seizing.
• strategic-foresight: AI for weak signals of advantage, and the finding that markets price in erosion that firms may not yet see.

Dangling (single-source mention, deferred per author-entity promotion): Andy West, Sébastien Lacroix, Whitney Zimmerman, Tim Koller, Andrew Marshall.

Source quality note

Auto-generated transcript. Names and terms were corrected at acquire time (McKinsey, Sean Brown, Sébastien Lacroix, Tim Koller, leasing, telcos, chess moves); see the raw file’s notes:. The host gives the book’s publication month as November in the intro and October in the outro. Both are left as spoken.

This is McKinsey presenting its own research on its own channel, in support of a practice and a forthcoming book. None of the underlying studies is ingested, so the following are all verbal characterisations: the 1,000-company survey, the 50-company teardown, the 35% → 21% decline, the “twice the capital” finding, and the five-year mobilization comparison. The episode also does not say how “mobilization” was measured separately from “execution” in that comparison, and the headline claim depends on exactly that separation.

Three smaller points. The 35% → 21% figure is self-reported by executives about their own strategies, so it measures confidence as much as quality. Lacroix calls it “a 40% drop over the last 10 years”, but the stated window is 2010–2024. The nine-in-ten priced-in finding is from an outside-in analysis, and West says plainly that “whether that was observable to those companies, you know, we don’t know.” And the 10% figure here (firms with data behind their claimed advantage) is a different measure from the 10% in Banholzer & LaBerge (firms fully aligned on what their advantage is), although both come from the same research programme. Do not quote one as the other.