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Enterprise strategy isn't broken, execution is

Enterprise strategy isn't broken, execution is

Fast Companya day ago

As the pace and complexity of business accelerate, enterprise leaders are under pressure to deliver more, faster: more growth, innovation, and resilience. And yet, despite bold visions and thoughtful strategies, many organizations still struggle to execute effectively.
It's not because leaders fail to plan; they lack real-time visibility and alignment.
In my role working closely with product and technology leaders across industries, a consistent pattern emerges: Strategy is often clear at the top, but somewhere between the boardroom and the frontlines, execution becomes fragmented. Priorities get lost in translation. Resources are misaligned, and risks are spotted too late. What started as a solid strategic plan ends up slipping out of reach.
This disconnect between strategy and execution isn't a minor inefficiency; it poses a systemic risk. When leaders lack real-time visibility into how work is progressing across their organization, even the best-laid plans can derail. The impact is both tangible and costly:
Missed revenue from delayed go-to-market initiatives
Rising costs from duplicated work or misaligned efforts
Operational risk from bottlenecks or blockers no one saw coming
Erosion of culture over time, weakening alignment, and organizational health
A lack of connected insight
Enterprise leaders don't suffer from a lack of data; they suffer from a lack of connected insight.
Dashboards and status updates are often backward-looking, fragmented across systems, and disconnected from the actual work. This creates a lag between what's happening and what leaders think is happening, making it challenging to anticipate risks or adjust course in time. But with AI, we now have access to radical, objective visibility—insights grounded in real-time data rather than subjective reporting. More importantly, AI empowers them to lead proactive change across large, complex organizations by predicting challenges early and helping navigate transformation with speed and precision.
This shift marks a new era in leadership, one where execution is no longer just about tracking work but about driving continuous change and adaptability at scale.
Modern platforms can help
Modern work management platforms are evolving to meet this challenge by providing leaders with real-time visibility and control while preserving the autonomy and agility of their teams. These solutions connect strategy to execution, enabling organizations to deliver impact with greater speed, consistency, and confidence.
Effective execution tools combine control and agility without forcing trade-offs, enabling leaders to maintain oversight while empowering teams to stay productive. They leverage explainable AI to flag emerging risks, clarify their root causes, and prioritize urgency, supporting more informed, proactive decision making. These tools also embed visibility directly into the workflows where teams operate, driving consistent data usage and ensuring strong adoption across the organization.
Bridge strategy and execution
To lead effectively in today's landscape, enterprise organizations must rethink how to bridge the gap between strategy and execution. This means evolving beyond static planning cycles and siloed reporting, enabling real-time coordination across teams, projects, and priorities.
Specifically, leaders need:
Live portfolio visibility to monitor execution in real time and surface emerging risks
Standardized frameworks that align teams without creating bottlenecks or rigidity
Workforce intelligence tools that ensure the right people are working on the right priorities
AI-powered insights that not only flag risks early but also help explain and prioritize them
These capabilities are not just nice-to-haves; they reflect the most common and urgent needs we hear from enterprise leaders. Delivering them requires once-unimaginable AI tools designed to enable leaders to act swiftly, navigate confidently, and adapt at scale.
The future of enterprise success won't be defined by the boldest ideas alone but by the ability to consistently turn those ideas into outcomes. Achieving this starts with asking the right questions: Can you see how your top priorities progress in real time? Are your teams clearly aligned with your strategic goals? And are you leading proactively, or simply reacting after the fact?
Execution is no longer a downstream function. It's a leadership imperative. In the age of AI, the systems we rely on to manage work must enable agility, speed, and transformation like never before.

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‘We're on the cusp of more widespread adoption': Laura Shin on Trump, stablecoins, and the global rise of cryptocurrency
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Fast Company

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  • Fast Company

‘We're on the cusp of more widespread adoption': Laura Shin on Trump, stablecoins, and the global rise of cryptocurrency

With the first family actively engaged in memecoin ventures, speculation about the future of cryptocurrency has never been hotter. Laura Shin, crypto expert and host of the podcast Unchained, reveals the sector's emerging economic, political, and geopolitical implications. Shin also provides context for why stablecoins are growing so fast and how the current administration is shaping the conversation. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You call yourself a no-hype crypto journalist, so can you give us a short, no-hype overview of where we are right now in crypto's evolution? Yeah, I would say we're probably on the cusp of more widespread adoption. The number-one biggest reason is simply that the Trump administration is really embracing crypto. That has not been true of previous administrations. In fact, the Biden administration was probably, I want to say, actively hostile. I don't know if people will love that term, but that's probably a pretty accurate description. For a long time, there were a lot of entrepreneurs who were cautious about doing things in the U.S. This administration is more, not only open-minded, but even in some regards almost a little bit too embracing of crypto, you could say. I think there's going to be probably a decent number of crypto IPOs this year, but then on top of it, stablecoins are probably the first major application that has really found what the industry likes to call product-market fit. We're seeing that stablecoins have a huge amount of uptake, especially in so many other jurisdictions where they don't trust their local currency. It could be Argentina or Venezuela or Turkey or Nigeria. There are just a lot of places where people don't actually have a great way to save their money, and they maybe don't also have really great ways to send money across borders. So, stablecoins are fulfilling that role and Congress is probably on the cusp of finally passing legislation here in the U.S. around stablecoins. For a layperson, someone not engaged in the crypto world, can you just explain what a stablecoin is relative to a memecoin, relative to whatever the portfolio might look like? Yeah, so a stablecoin is any blockchain-based asset that is pegged to the value of some other asset—99% of all stablecoins are pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. The way that stablecoins really took off initially was that on a number of crypto exchanges, people wanted to be able to buy and trade using dollars. I wrote this book called The Cryptopians, and it covers 2013 until 2018. Even at that time, people would recite back to me the price of Bitcoin or the price of Ether in dollars. No matter whether they were European or Asian or just wherever they were in the world, they always knew the price in dollars. . . . Here's a really simple example: There's a serial entrepreneur in Afghanistan. Her name is Roya Mahboob, and she had this microblogging platform, and I think a lot of the people writing for it were women. They had a hard time paying them, because a lot of women in Afghanistan, they don't have bank accounts, or if they do, then their male relatives might actually take the money that they earned from them. So [the platform] set them up with Bitcoin wallets and then taught them how to use them. 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