85% of Employees Don't Know Your Strategy — Here's the Fix
Former Green Beret and tech executive Evan Campbell joins the Measure Success Podcast to break down why most strategies fail and how OKRs fix it. Listen now.
Words by
Carl J. Cox
Most executives think their strategy is crystal clear. Then they run an employee engagement survey. And find out 85% of their team can't tell you what the strategic objectives even are. That gap between what leadership believes and what actually lands is where most strategies die.
In this episode of the Measure Success Podcast, I sat down with Evan Campbell, a former Green Beret and seasoned technology executive who's led two successful IPOs and several acquisitions, and now runs Chinook Ranch Consulting from his ranch near Durango, Colorado. Evan is the author of Adapt to Win, and we dig into why so many strategies never make it past the PowerPoint deck.
From Cell Tower to C-Suite
Evan's path into technology started literally freezing on top of a cell tower during his early telecom career, after leaving the Army's special forces.
He went to night school to learn Java, discovered he loved the technology environment even though he was, in his words, a terrible programmer, and worked his way into architecture and systems thinking.
From there: CTO roles, two IPOs, "many, many horrible disasters," and a consulting firm he eventually sold to Accenture, where he spent three years as a managing director.
Why Big Consulting Firms Miss the Mark
Evan doesn't see himself as competing with McKinsey, BCG, or Bain. He sees himself cleaning up after them.
"Sun Tzu should have said, victory comes not from developing a great strategy. Victory comes from executing strategy with great effectiveness."
His take: big firms are excellent at strategy formulation but often aren't interested in the actual implementation. By his estimate, only about 20% of big consulting firms' strategies actually get implemented.
The Three Phases of Strategy
Evan breaks strategy into three distinct phases, each requiring a different competency:
• Formulation — developing the strategy itself
• Deployment — decomposing high-level objectives down to every role at the right granularity, so everyone knows what to focus on
• Execution — tracking progress and course-correcting, not just checking in once a quarter
OKRs vs. the Old MBOs
An objective is an ambitious, inspiring goal. Key results are empirical, numerical, unambiguous measures — if all of them hit 100%, the objective is achieved by definition.
Evan shared a real example of a bad OKR from his own career: a key result to "sign up 500 partners."
"That is an output. That is not an outcome. What is the business impact?"
Better key results measure the outcome that actually matters — referral revenue, not signature count.
Why Six Good Partners Beat a Hundred Bad Ones
This ties back to the Pareto principle. Evan's rule of thumb: the faster you get to the 20% that actually moves the needle, the faster you skip the painful learning.
Six to seven highly aligned partners who actually need and want to sell your product beat a hundred loosely committed ones with no follow-up.
Why Quarterly Isn't Often Enough
Frequent course corrections are cheap and small. Infrequent ones create what Evan calls hysteresis — you drift further and further off course until a dramatic correction may or may not save you.
Evan compared it to land navigation training in the military: if you're not paying attention, you can walk in a circle through the woods and end up back where you started without ever realizing it.
The same thing happens to companies that only check in on strategy once a quarter.
Where Do We Play, How Do We Win
Evan leans on Roger Martin's framework when he starts with a new client: a strategy isn't defined with useful clarity unless it clearly answers "where do we play?" and "how do we win?"
Executive teams that believe they're aligned often aren't — the moment you scratch beneath the surface, the consensus falls apart.
Measuring Success, Professionally and Personally
Evan avoids what he calls "transformation theater" — politically driven exercises that relabel things without changing anything. He looks for innovative, courageous leaders focused on real strategic outcomes.
On a personal level, Evan and his wife Kim are easing into retirement on their ranch near Durango, Colorado, putting up thousands of bales of hay every year. His daughter Lauren lives in Madrid, and his son Dylan is an outdoorsman in Bozeman.
Final Thoughts
Evan's framework comes back to one idea: a strategy nobody executes is just a wish. The gap most companies have isn't a bad strategy — it's a bad handoff between the boardroom and the people doing the work every day.
Listen to the full episode and ask yourself: if you stopped an employee in the hallway tomorrow, could they tell you your company'
