Simplify our Strategy: People with the right attitude should be in “command”

[see the video] http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2012/08/simplify-your-strategy.html

Why managers who proved to be inadequate to formulate strategies [in a long time timeframe] continue to be maintained in an organization.

This is the first question you should answer in order to understand the difference between “words/metrics/slides” and “results/fact/outputs”

We live in an age where people are not responsible/accountable even if we use a terminology that should inspire a high sense of responsibility... here we hear words like "battles to win". This means only a thing that a soldier knows very well: “life or death”.

In Roman Legions the "decimation" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army) ) was applied only in cases of mutinous or cowardly soldiers and, however, it was used only in rare cases.

The same happened also on World War I, for example by field marshal Cadorna in the Italian front. But Italian Army started to resist, fight and, at the end, win when Cadorna was removed by another field marshal Armando Diaz that had a different behavior and approach.

This is not a case. The first element of strategy is the human element, so People.
People generate Strategies.

[from the video] ...Why is it that great strategies and appearing to have no impact on organization… the typical answer is we have a great strategy, we have just lost the execution: that’s the “colpa”… the reality , in the most cases when companies fail the executed strategy, is that the strategy itself is a large part of the problem…

People are a large part of the problem…

Only few people have a high strategist attitude.

Organization should be structured to be able to identify, selected and put in charge the right people. Only in this way you can continue to create, capture and sustain the economic value, so what a firm strategy should be.

You can fight as a Spartan or you can fight as a “Xerxes I of Persia /Cadorna”

A Spartan does not kill his Brothers in arms because in his Warrior Spirit he knows the value of Life.