Title: Strategy without execution is just activity | Marc Wilson, Global Advisors | COVER Innovators Network

Date: May 13, 2026

Speakers: Tony van Niekerk (Cover Magazine - Interviewer), Marc Wilson (Managing Partner at Global Advisors)

Tony: Hi, this is Tony on the back of the Innovators Network that was just held here in Melrose Arch and I'm speaking to Marc Wilson, strategy director at Global Advisors. Marc, thank you very much for chatting to me today.

Marc: Pleasure. Thank you, Tony and good speaking at your event today.

Tony: Thank you very much for fascinating presentation. It was really interesting and I think spot on in terms of that holistic approach and transforming the business as a whole. A couple of questions around the discussions that we had today is as an experienced strategy advisor to different global and international businesses, what do you see as the biggest challenge in the crossover from strategy crossing over into implementation?

Marc: Yeah, I think that what we're seeing at the moment is strategy is typically deployed into an organization that hasn't been readied for that strategy in an appropriate way. And so often organization design, processes, people etc. are an afterthought to the actual strategy itself. And as a result, particularly in the world that is now changing as rapidly as it is with AI, what we see there is that the org design has not actually been thought of. And so you're trying to deploy strategy into an organization that's not ready for it.

And that's why I think some of the leading implementations that we're seeing are looking at compensation structures, competency models and training and onboarding etc. of employees to ready the organization for the strategy and to achieve the goals.

I think also the strategy is evolving quickly in terms of the pace that it needs to be adapted and so the days of doing the 50-year plans, the 10 years, the 5-year plans etc. are now needing to be updated far more regularly. And as a result of that things that are being deployed are not actually strategized and become just piloting purgatory where people are piloting new technologies, AI in the organization, without actually deploying that fully into the organization and as a result they never realize the full benefit from the implementation.

Tony: Yeah. Obviously when it comes to strategy, and you would know much better than me, but the strategy should sort of all the time keep in mind the implementation, the possibility of implementation etc. And when it comes to technology especially and what you spoke about now, how fast-paced the change is etc., how do you make sure that what you're working on from a technology perspective is going—the company's going to be ready to implement that?

Marc: Yeah, I think somebody once said to me that the best strategy for an organization is the one that is able to execute and I think that that's probably never been more true with the scale of change that's being forced onto organizations.

The I guess the other alternative to that is that there may be strategic change that's required that an organization is incapable of and then needs to look at the actual corporate structure, M&A, etc. to fix its ability to respond to the change. And so strategy can play that dual role. It needs to be something that can be implemented and executed and the best strategy for the organization is the one that can be implemented. And then if you cannot land that strategy but the market is changing around you, then looking at how do you actually change the organization to address the strategic gap.

Tony: And I mean all of the speakers today including yourself spoke a lot about the holistic approach and about transforming the business as a whole. Again with the fast-paced developments etc., how do businesses actually ensure that they have the ability internally from a staff and a skills etc. perspective to take on what is coming from an implementation perspective which a lot of the time the business might not even know about until there comes a time?

Marc: I think there are two answers to that. The first one is that if AI is to deliver the benefits from an efficiency perspective etc., it needs to actually free up people and free up bandwidth in the organization from the mundane day-to-day tasks and that is an opportunity to redeploy that attention back into the business in more strategic roles. So I think we're confronted with a real opportunity to change the traditional paradigm which is one of loading the pipeline and overloading people with limited bandwidth with massive strategic change. So I think we have to plan for the fact that we need to displace some of the traditional mundane work from the organization, free people up and then create the space for the strategy to be deployed.

Unfortunately that's not always the same people. So it's often the same people that have got that limited strategic bandwidth that will be overloaded in this case. So that would be the one thing.

I think the other thing is the best CIO I ever met and worked with was one who looked at the portfolio of their business and actively managed activity in the portfolio over time and so said we need to free up continually the capacity that's being absorbed by our legacy, by our business as usual etc. and redeploy that back into the new parts of the business and they actively manage that portfolio through budget and allocation of resources and people and I think that that is again going to be critical to free up the appropriate resources to focus on the scale of change.

Tony: Yeah, absolutely. And maybe just on a closing question and maybe looking at it a bit more altruistic from a business perspective, a lot of people are not going to be part of that AI race. A lot of staff is going to have to be accommodated in a different way, maybe outside of the company. So it's a reality. You showed some of the pictures, somebody else showed some videos about the tsunami that's coming at us, which is true especially from an employment perspective. How do you think companies are thinking altruistic enough in preparing staff in such a way that you can almost segment these are the people that might not make it through the technology implementation? How do we manage that process?

Marc: Yeah, I don't think organizations are ready for the scale of change that is coming. And I think that there again this is a multifaceted answer to that question. What we're probably not going to see, and what the research is saying, is that a number of the people who have their task capacity freed up as a result of AI are not freed up as a whole. They have remaining work to do. And so one of the difficulties of deploying the technology is actually that we don't see the realized benefits because we're just freeing up time from a person and not a whole person. So that does require redesign to actually get the benefits. Right?

I think the other part of that is that what's being shown to happen, and the latest research out of Harvard, is that people are now working more intensely as a result of AI than they were previously and their cognitive load is going up because they're being focused on higher cognitive tasks than the previous tasks which were admin errands etc. And so that in itself is changing the nature of work for a whole group of people where work is becoming more intense, more strategic and higher stakes. So I think that those aspects are critical.

There are definitely going to be people who don't fit the new world and what many organizations are really grappling with is identifying those people and then working on outplacement tasks etc. so that those people can find space in the new world. Jamie Dimon who's the CEO of JPMorgan recently looked at the trucking industry in the US and the number of truckers in the US is a very large number—in the order of a million people—and what he said is that the industry, government as a whole are not ready for automated trucking to hit that industry and as a result of that he said that we need to make place for those people who are going to be outplaced from that industry because they're not going to be able to do the same job. And he advocates for the fact that that needs to exist at a government level and a business level jointly to understand what the impact is on outplacement of people.

Tony: Yeah. And I mean you spoke about the intensity of the work, the demand, cognitive demand etc. But the bright side of that could also be that, as you said, they're transforming some of the work that the person does. So he's left with a more intense but it might mean that because it's so intense you work less hours and we accommodate the fact that the intensity means people shouldn't be working 8 hours a day because it's going to be eight intense hours.

Marc: It is interesting, Tony, that the evidence is actually showing exactly the opposite. So, we're not seeing reduced hours, we're actually seeing more intense hours and more hours. So that's the latest research out of Harvard that came out this month. So I think that the challenge over there is that, you know, organizations will push more work onto people when they have more capacity. And as that work becomes more cognitive heavy, those key people become more and more critical to those tasks as the work evolves. So we're not seeing that freeing up of people and a better lifestyle.

I think what we are seeing though is, somebody said that we need to free people up from the mundane tasks, the repetitive rote type tasks that they do on a day-to-day basis. And if you think of the insurance industry and things like claim processing and document processing etc., for I guess centuries we've had people who are working in just the process of absorbing the paperwork and converting the information and the paperwork etc. And hopefully that kind of work will go away, resulting in a better quality of life for the people who are doing more interesting work than the traditional work which is more factory type work.

Tony: Yeah, I think it comes back to that whole thing of holistic thinking and considering everything and the impact that it will have not just on the business as such but also on the people within that business. Yeah, fascinating.

Marc: That's true. Tony, I think one more thing though is that nobody knows how this is going to work out and in a high pace, high uncertain environment, the ability to adapt strategy and be agile as you roll strategy out and form strategy on an ongoing basis becomes a differentiator. And so what we're going to see here is we're going to see those organizations that are able to fast prototype, fast change and fast change their strategy and then repeat. They are going to be the winners at the end of the day. So I think that the jury is still out as to what the future looks like, as it always is, but never more so than right now. And as a result of that, organizations need the capacity to really evaluate the success of the change that they're embarking on and adapt as they go along.

Tony: So the exciting times are here, but it might turn out to be the Chinese exciting times, you know, like the Chinese interesting times. Yeah. Marc, thank you so much. It was great chatting to you and thank you once again for your contribution today. It was really valuable to the conversation.

Marc: Thank you for the invitation.