Adapt to win: how CFOs turn strategy into action

Every company has a strategy. The harder question is whether that strategy shows up in the budget, the project portfolio, the allocation of people, and the decisions leaders make when priorities compete.

In this episode of Liquid: How CFOs Outperform, Thomas Gavaghan speaks with Evan Campbell, author of Adapt to Win, about the forces that prevent organizations from turning strategic intent into results. Evan explains how strategy decay and organizational inertia weaken execution, why artificial precision in budgeting limits agility, and how CFOs can help direct scarce capital and capacity toward the highest-value opportunities.

The conversation also explores how OKRs create vertical and horizontal alignment, why excess work in process undermines portfolio performance, and how leaders can create a culture where stopping or redirecting an initiative is viewed as disciplined portfolio management rather than failure. Drawing on his experience as an Airborne Ranger and Green Beret, Evan also shares lessons on command intent, empowerment, and building organizational capability.

What you need to know

Evan Campbell argues that the CFO has a central role in turning strategy into action. Finance leaders are not simply responsible for controlling spend. They can help the organization clarify its priorities, allocate resources dynamically, and determine whether investment is producing the business outcomes that matter.

Strategy decays when the signal gets lost

Evan describes strategy decay as the gradual loss of clarity between leadership’s intent and the work being done across the organization. As strategic priorities move from executives to managers and frontline teams, the message becomes diluted by competing goals, market pressures, emergencies, and day-to-day noise.

Organizational inertia compounds the problem. Companies naturally continue doing what they are already doing, even when the strategy requires new investments, different priorities, or meaningful trade-offs. Leaders must continually reinforce the strategic signal and create enough momentum to move the organization in a new direction.

CFOs can make control and agility complementary

Evan challenges the idea that financial control and organizational agility are opposing forces. He argues that CFOs can support both by treating investment more like a venture capital portfolio.

Rather than committing blindly to large, multi-year initiatives, organizations can release funding in stages and require measurable outcomes before providing additional investment. This approach creates opportunities to inspect progress, reallocate capital, and respond when conditions change. It also helps replace annual budgets that are effectively “dead on arrival” with a more dynamic approach to investment management.

Evan also warns against artificial precision, particularly when cost estimates are highly detailed but expected benefits are little more than unsupported assumptions. A business case should have a comparable level of rigor on both sides of the equation.

Portfolio management means allocating scarce capacity

Portfolio management is ultimately the process of allocating scarce capacity against unlimited demand. That capacity may include investment capital, people, production time, technology resources, or supply chain availability.

Evan explains that excess work in process is one of the most destructive forces in an organization. When companies start more initiatives than they can effectively complete, everything becomes late, priorities become unclear, and valuable capacity is consumed by churn and coordination.

His recommendation is to understand the organization’s true delivery capacity, leave room for change, and break large initiatives into smaller, measurable outcomes. Leaders should reassess the portfolio regularly, compare ongoing work with new opportunities, and be willing to stop initiatives when their incremental value declines.

OKRs create alignment across the organization

Evan sees OKRs as a way to create both vertical and horizontal alignment. Employees and teams should understand how their objectives connect to the broader strategy, but they also need to coordinate across functions and value streams.

That horizontal alignment is essential because strategic initiatives rarely belong to a single department. They require cooperation across product, technology, finance, operations, sales, and other parts of the organization. Without shared objectives and measures, teams may be working hard while pursuing disconnected priorities.

Evan frames this as a connection between “where we play” and “how we win” at the strategic level, and the measurable objectives that help teams determine whether they are contributing to that direction.

Adaptation starts with execution capability

Evan offers a practical sequence for becoming an adaptive organization. First, a company must build the capability to deploy and execute its current strategy. Only then can it reliably sense changes, adjust priorities, and deploy a new strategy quickly.

That capability depends on small enough initiatives, frequent inspection, clear measures, and the ability to reallocate capital and people. Adaptation is not simply changing the strategy more often. It is building an organization that can recognize when circumstances have changed and respond without waiting for the next annual planning cycle.

Additional topics covered in this episode

• Why strategic initiatives often fail when leaders avoid difficult trade-offs.

• How the sunk-cost fallacy creates zombie projects and “watermelon” status reporting.

• Why empowered teams with clear command intent can outperform detailed top-down instructions.

• What Evan’s military experience taught him about leadership, trust, and organizational capability.

• How his transitions from technology and consulting to authorship and ranch life shaped his approach to reinvention.