Advance knowledge of a strategy shift lets a peer press a rival into objectives the shift will make worthless, so the rival spends a cycle on work that later reads as out of touch.
An example
Two months before a home-goods retailer announced its purchase of an online marketplace, the head of corporate development, who sat on the deal team, chaired the strategy review where the president of the e-commerce division set her annual objectives. He pressed her to commit to a regional localization program: separate storefronts, pricing, and fulfillment for six regions. When she asked whether anything in the pipeline might affect the roadmap, he said there was nothing he could share and that the board wanted ambition. His own unit's objectives stayed vague. She spent the first half of the year building three regional storefronts. The deal was announced in June, and the marketplace's single national platform made the regional builds redundant. At the year-end review her division was described as "out of step with the new strategy," and corporate development led the integration.
Why it works
Once the strategy shift is public, the rival's diligent work against the old objectives is suddenly worth little or becomes a liability, so their record looks worse. They have spent a full cycle of effort, headcount, and political capital on goals that now read as out of touch. The actor, who avoided committing to the doomed objectives and may have prepared work that fits the new direction, looks prescient by contrast. Access to pending-strategy information the rival lacks is the precondition, together with enough authority or proximity to shape the rival's objectives without suspicion and a review culture that punishes mid-cycle pivots more than it rewards good-faith execution.
The thinking behind it
George A. Akerlof The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism (1970), Akerlof's paper on asymmetric information, explains the power of whoever knows what the other side cannot check. A peer on the deal team knows the strategy is about to change, and the division president setting objectives does not. That is why an unusually eager push to commit, from someone with inside information, is itself information, and why a context briefing from your own boss is the first defense.
Robert B. Cialdini Influence (1984) describes commitment and consistency: once people have taken a position, especially a public or written one, they feel pressure to act in line with it. Pressing a rival to commit publicly to specific objectives makes a mid-cycle pivot look like inconsistency and the stranded work look like their own misjudgment. Mid-cycle review rights written into the objectives give them a consistent way to change course.
Warning signs
Pressure to commit to specific, ambitious objectives comes from a peer in the strategy circle, who declines to brief you on context and says there is nothing they can share. Their own unit's objectives stay vague, and their eagerness for your commitment is unusual. Then a pivot lands mid-cycle, leaving your work stranded while theirs fits the new direction.
How to defend yourself
When someone with inside information is unusually keen for you to commit to a fixed path, the eagerness is itself information.
- Ask your own boss or the chief executive for a briefing on strategic context before you commit to annual objectives.
- Write mid-cycle review rights into your objectives, so a strategy change at the top triggers a reset.
- Keep your own sources on pending shifts: finance, the board office, peers on adjacent teams.
- Sequence the work so its earliest phases produce value under more than one strategy.
If a pivot strands your work, document when you were told and what you asked, and ask that the review treat the stranded effort as a result of the strategy change.
How a leader shuts it down
Forgive effort stranded by strategy changes at the top, explicitly and in reviews. Build mid-cycle review rights into objective setting. Keep people with privileged information about pending moves out of the role of setting objectives for peers who compete with them.