Strategy implementation: what is the failure rate?

Strategy implementation has attracted the interest of researchers from the strategic management field almost since its foundation and has been the subject of much debate, in part, due to the ‘high’ percentage of organisational strategies that fail. It is often claimed that 50 to 90 percent of strategic initiatives fail to succeed. These claims have often been used to propose new management tools and to dismiss others. As we intend to show, although these claims have had a significant impact in management practice and theory, they are, however, controversial. In this paper we aim to clarify why this is the case and to emphasise that any attempts to produce a generic estimate of the rate of failure based on the current state of affairs are of little practical value. To this purpose an extensive review of the literature is presented and discussed. Based on the analysis of this literature, we conclude that whilst it is widely acknowledged that the implementation of a new strategy can be a difficult task, nobody seems to really know what the true rate of implementation failure is. Much of this uncertainty is due to the fact that some of the estimates presented in the literature are based on evidence that is eitheroutdated, fragmentary, fragile, or just absent. Careful consideration is therefore advised before using these estimates to promote changes in the theory and/or practice of strategic management