Organisational Gravity

The Real Reason Your FMCG Strategy Never Survives Year Two

Most large FMCG organisations do not have a strategy problem. They have an execution gravity problem.

I have spent the past months interviewing senior executives across spirits, dairy, food, consumer health, beverages, and household products. Different categories. Different continents. Same finding, stated almost word-for-word by people who have never met.

“I have never executed Year 2 of a five-year plan. Never. I have executed Year 1 five, six, seven, eight times in a row.”

Read that again. Not one executive describing one bad year. A pattern, repeated across sectors, describing a five-year plan that resets to Year 1 every single time. The strategy changes. The deck changes. The consultants change. The organisation does not.

This is not a capability failure. These companies employ experienced, commercially sharp people. It is not a failure of the strategy's quality either. Most of the strategy documents I reviewed during this research were adequately constructed, and some of them were genuinely good. What fails is something underneath the strategy. A systemic pull drags the organisation back to what it already knows how to do, regardless of what the strategy says it should do next.

I call it Organisational Gravity. Understanding it, not writing a better strategy deck, is the actual unlock for FMCG leadership teams.

Can’t wait to learn more about The Strategy Execution Gaps in FMCG?