From Planning to Performance: Designing the Strategy System

A conversation with Charlie Newark-French, CEO of Cascade

Most executives know the frustration: brilliant strategy decks that never translate into results. For Charlie Newark-French, CEO of Cascade, the issue isn’t the quality of ideas, it’s the lack of a proper system to run them.

In this Exec Edge Q&A, Charlie shares why strategy execution lags behind other business functions, how companies can close the gap, and the practical rhythms that turn vision into performance.

How do you define a “strategy system” and why does it matter?

Every major function in a company has a system. Sales has a CRM. Finance has FP&A. Operations has an ERP to manage resources. These systems might connect in some ways, but they are built to run their own domains.

When leaders come together to run the business, they often do it in PowerPoint. PowerPoint is great for presenting ideas, but it is not a system for running anything. You wouldn’t run your sales team in PowerPoint, so why run your entire strategy in it?

A strategy system gives leaders one place to set direction, track progress, and make adjustments across the whole business. It combines the right platform with the right processes — like weekly leadership meetings, board reviews, and regular strategy check-ins — so that strategy becomes part of day-to-day management, not just an annual exercise.

What’s the biggest mistake companies make when designing a strategy system?

They focus too much on creating the plan and not enough on how they will run it for the rest of the year.

In the early 2000s, leaders got really good at tracking the short term. Twenty years ago, if you asked a CRO for their annual forecast, they’d do some rough math in Excel and rely on gut feel. Today, they look at dashboards with pipeline, close rates, loss analysis, rep performance, and more.

Strategy hasn’t gone through that same evolution. Too often, we leave great ideas in a presentation and think that saying them once at the annual kickoff is enough for them to happen. It’s not.

Even though strategy is long-term, it can’t survive in a system that only checks in once a year. It needs the same kind of consistent, disciplined cadence that sales or operations have.

Can you share an example where improving the strategy system led to real performance gains?

A strategy system drives performance in the same way a CRM ultimately drives sales. We see it all the time. In some of the more extreme cases, companies go from hitting less than 20 percent of their corporate objectives to delivering more than 80 percent. It is not that they suddenly had better ideas. It is that they had the structure to turn those ideas into action, track them in real time, and make fast adjustments when things were not working.

One example we’ve seen closely is the University of Sydney. They’re Australia’s oldest and one of its most prestigious universities, with over 50,000 students and a very complex, federated structure. They had a clear strategic vision, but with so many faculties and schools operating semi-independently, it was hard to keep everyone aligned and still give local teams the autonomy they needed.

Before they had a strategy system, people were doing a lot of work on strategic initiatives, but it was scattered — in people’s heads, on email, in spreadsheets. There was no easy way to see how it all connected to the university’s goals. With Cascade, they were able to link faculty and school-level plans directly back to the central strategy. That gave them both alignment and empowerment. Faculties could manage their own plans, while still contributing to the bigger picture.

It also meant they could update goals once and have those updates flow everywhere they needed to be, including the complex matrix of committees and governance bodies. Reporting that used to be time-consuming is now automated from a single source of truth. The result was greater cohesion, better visibility, and far more engagement from teams, because they could see exactly how their work connected to the university’s long-term priorities.

What tools or rhythms have made the biggest difference?

There are three essential parts to a strategy rhythm: set the plan, track the plan, and improve the plan. It’s the same as the CRM analogy. You set a sales goal, track every part of performance you can, and keep refining as you learn. For planning sessions, I like Miro. For actually digitizing the plan and tracking it, Cascade.

Here’s how I recommend structuring the year. About three months before year-end, start the annual planning process. By one month before the new year, the plan should be finalized. It should include a five-year outlook, with the most detail in the first year. Break that first year into smaller, manageable pieces so progress can be tracked.

At the start of the year, hold a kickoff to get everyone aligned. Then, keep the plan active: weekly leadership meetings to review progress, monthly check-ins to resolve issues, and quarterly reviews to adjust the plan based on what’s working and what isn’t.

How do you handle tension between long-term goals and short-term fires?

Right now, short-term fires almost always win, and that leads to bad decisions. Maybe you keep an underperformer because you cannot afford to lose someone right now, or you take a bad deal just to hit this quarter’s numbers, or you rush a product because a feature needs to ship.

The question I always ask is: “What will I, six months from now, wish I had done today?” It takes the short-term pain out of the equation and forces you to think about the outcome you will want later.

I have also found that firefighting creates more fires. One small compromise spreads, and before you know it, you are dealing with bigger and more frequent crises. Maybe that rushed product turns into angry customers later, or that bad hire drives away your best performer.

When you make the right long-term call, you see fewer fires in the short term too. The payoff comes faster than you expect.

What role does the strategy team play in performance delivery?

We have seen many different approaches, and the one that consistently fails is when the strategy team is only there to do analysis. Producing reports or recommendations and then stepping away does not change outcomes. It also cannot be a one-off role. You cannot just weigh in on an acquisition and then disappear.

The most effective model is when the strategy team works closely with leadership to build the plan and then translate it into clear, short-term objectives with measurable KPIs. From there, they monitor progress, identify what is working and what is not, and help leadership make adjustments.

Ultimately, strategy is delivered by frontline teams. The strategy team’s job is to make sure those teams understand their role in the bigger picture, have the clarity to act on it, and that progress is visible and connected back to the overall plan.

Closing Thoughts

As Charlie makes clear, a strategy system is more than software, it’s a discipline. Companies that bring the same rigor to strategy execution as they do to sales or operations will not only hit more of their objectives, they’ll build the muscle for long-term transformation.