Where strategy loses force before it becomes execution.

That gap, between the strategy on the slide and the one people actually execute, is where almost every company wins or loses.

So I built the first piece of the series around it.

I took Iberdrola's public 2025 numbers, a record profit and a €58B plan through 2028, and mapped the exercise I would run with them: 3 objectives, cascaded by business unit, every priority with one accountable owner and a weekly rhythm.

One honest note: I do not have their internal plans. Nobody outside does. This is my read of their public strategy, turned into an execution architecture. That is exactly the work.

And here is what twenty years taught me: the architecture matters far less than people think. What makes or breaks it is who owns each number, and whether you review it every week. A strategy with no owner is a wish. With no weekly rhythm, it is forgotten by February.

That gap is where I've spent 20 years, and it is the most expensive problem in business.

So I'm starting something. I take a listed company's public strategy and show exactly how I would turn it into execution. No internal data. My read, my method.

Episode 2: Novo Nordisk. A company that stayed obsessed with one problem, diabetes and obesity, for over a century. The strategy is world-class. But at their scale, strategy isn't the hard part anymore. Execution is.

In the video, I put the three strategic priorities I'd hang on the wall if I had one hour with their CEO.

The one idea I'd leave behind: don't organise execution around functions. Organise it around your biggest constraint, the single priority your whole leadership team owns together. That turns alignment from a weekly fight into something structural.

The CEO walked through each business. The CFO through the numbers and the forecast. One of the best-run companies in Europe, and it shows.

A results call has one job: report the quarter to the market. Volvo does it well.

What I always listen for is harder, and separate: the line from the quarter to the destination. Why does this quarter matter for the 2030 ambition? What is the one leading indicator that says next quarter is on track for that story?

That line is not reporting. It is execution. And you build it by reverse-engineering the vision: start at 2030, work back to 2028, to 2026, to this quarter, so every quarter has a reason it matters and a number that proves it is on track.

Volvo has earned the right to think that far ahead. Even in a softer market it stayed the most profitable of the commercial-vehicle giants, a 10.7% operating margin, above Daimler (7.8%) and Traton (6.3%).

It is #1 in Europe, sits on nearly €6bn of net cash, and is far more than trucks: construction equipment, buses, Volvo Penta and financial services, with services now a quarter of the group. In June it doubled down with a strategy it calls "built for resilience and growth."

So if I were sitting with CEO Martin Lundstedt, three moves:

Defend the margin edge that makes Volvo the most profitable of the giants. It pays for everything else.

Win the electric transition, do not hedge it. Battery-electric is barely 2% of Europe's heavy trucks today. That is the runway, not the ceiling. Be the one who is ready first.

Invest through the cycle. When rivals retrench, Volvo takes share.

And tie every one back to 2030 with a leading indicator, so each quarter is a visible step toward the destination, not just a number on a slide.

€15.3bn of new orders last year, up 74%. A backlog of €24.9bn, three and a half years of work already sold.

It's the challenge every company dreams of. And it's a trap.

Because in a boom, the order book becomes a vanity metric. Orders came in at more than twice revenue. The whole sector is scaling at once, from Rheinmetall to BAE. Guaranteed demand doesn't mean guaranteed share.

You win the order by selling. You win the decade by delivering.

This week in my Strategy Execution Series, I break down how I'd turn Saab's record backlog into profitable market leadership: three objectives, each with an owner and a number, and the discipline not to overreach at the top of the cycle.

Stellantis just posted the first loss in its history. Porsche's profit margin fell from 17% to 1%. Some of the most admired names in the industry are paying for a promise. Not because electric was wrong. Because a promise is easy to make, and hard to keep. The vision was never the hard part. The execution was.

When a whole industry has to reinvent itself, there are really four ways through it. Transform the core: change the engine while the plane is still flying, the way Volvo Cars just showed it can be done. Build the new from scratch: the way Tesla and the Chinese did it, no baggage, but no safety net either.

Take your strengths to a fight you can win: Nokia left phones for networks, Fujifilm left film for healthcare. Buy the future, and let it breathe: Blockbuster could have bought Netflix, and laughed instead.

Four paths, one truth: the winners were never the ones with the loudest vision. They were the ones who made it happen. And I will say this part as a European, because this is home. We invented the car. America, with Ford, made it mass production. The idea and the execution are two different acts, and the next ten years belong to whoever masters the second one. That is still ours to earn.

Because a vision is decided at the top, but it is won on the ground, with the teams who have to make it real every single week. That is my work.

Two of its parts are worth more than the entire company. Which means the market prices everything else, the VW brand, Audi, Škoda, the whole car business, at close to zero. Everyone is writing about the cost cuts: around €15bn, up to 50,000 jobs. I think they are missing the real story. Cutting is not a strategy. It is a symptom.

Making cars barely makes money anymore. Volkswagen's margin fell below 3%; the best of its rivals, Mercedes and BMW, barely reach 6. The value has left the car. It moved to software, to AI, to autonomy. The car is becoming a robot that drives itself.

Tesla stopped calling itself a car company. Volkswagen is still losing money fixing its software while the frontier moved two steps ahead. And even if it wanted to reinvent, it may not be free to. It is controlled by a founding family, a government that can veto big decisions, and unions that hold half the board.

If I could sit across from Oliver Blume, I would not talk about costs. I would ask one thing. What do you want Volkswagen to be in 10 years? Not a smaller version of today. A different company. And the answer is not to become Tesla. It is to become what Volkswagen always was. The people's car, reborn for the age of autonomy.

Michelin is reinventing by addition. Last year it sold fewer tyres, yet cut its debt and threw off €2.1bn in cash. While everyone watched the tyre, it was building a second company: high-tech materials at close to 15% margin, higher than the tyre. A business already worth €1.25bn in sales. The best time to build your second business is while the first is still strong enough to pay for it.

Continental is reinventing by subtraction. It is splitting into focused parts, cutting loose everything that is not the tyre, to become one thing: the best premium tyre company in the world. The group earned 10.3%. The tyre inside it earned 13.6%. The best part was carrying the rest. So it chose to be smaller, and sharper.

But a split like this is never won in the strategy. It is won in the execution, in the handoffs between teams. That is where reinvention lives or dies.

That is Lamborghini: 10,747 cars, €3.2bn in revenue, both records. Yet EBIT fell 8%, with margin dropping from 27% to 24%. Thirty minutes up the road, Ferrari sold fewer cars than the year before and increased EBIT 12%, at a 29.5% margin. Same road. Same year. Same customers. Same American tariffs. So tariffs are not the answer.

The arithmetic is simple: Ferrari sold 112 fewer cars and made €222m more. Lamborghini sold 60 more cars and made €67m less.

There is a good story behind the rivalry. Ferruccio Lamborghini built tractors, owned Ferraris, complained about one, did not like the answer he got, and in 1963 started his own company. Lamborghini exists because Ferrari said no to a customer. Sixty years later, the difference between their accounts is still partly about who says no.

To be clear, a 24% EBIT margin is spectacular — Bentley made 8.3% in the same year. This is not a story about failure. It is about two companies doing brilliantly, while one still goes backwards. Almost nobody can be Ferrari. But almost everybody has been through Lamborghini's year. Volume is not the enemy. Volume you do not own is.

One warning, because I got this wrong myself once: sometimes price should go up. But if it goes up and the customer walks, you never had a pricing problem. You had a value problem, and the price was hiding it.

This episode covers the meeting that saved Ford, the loan Wall Street called desperate, why Rolls-Royce repeated the same move in 2023, and the seven moves I use in a leader's first 12 months. Number seven is the one most leaders skip.

The data got faster. The courage did not.