The people who make decisions and the people who live with them are not, in most organisations, the same. That distance is where execution stalls, and where we work.
The problem we solve
The plan arrives beautifully formed. It has been pored over, refined, stress-tested in conference rooms and blessed by the board. Then execution stalls, and the explanations begin: the market shifted; integration proved harder than anticipated; the team required more time. This is, almost without exception, untrue.
The shorthand for it is culture. The more precise description is ownership. The people who approved the plan and the people who have to execute it are, in most organisations, different people on different timetables. By the time the consequences arrive, the authors have moved on. No one is left to hold the gap. That is the work.
A pattern, seen from the inside
The deal logic rests on cultural and organisational conditions that do not, in fact, exist. What looked like alignment in the slide deck turns out to have been optimism. PowerPoint is a more forgiving environment than Teams.
Valuations that strip out the intangibles — trust, capability, the quiet institutional knowledge that took a decade to accumulate — systematically exclude the things that were actually driving the returns. The model was technically correct. The model was also wrong.
A product greenlit on a market need that was assumed rather than tested. The growth case did the persuading. The customers, it later emerged, had not been consulted on their role in it.
Who is behind it
SPG Advisory is led by Stephen Grainger. I have spent twenty years inside the institutions that move money: building cross-border products, sitting in deal rooms, and watching what happens when the people who approved the plan are not the ones who have to live with the outcome. Finding someone who has seen that gap from the inside is the start of the work. Have you?