Beyond Strategy: The Napoleon Approach
- Darren Emery
- Sep 1
- 5 min read
Focus, Adaptability, and Execution for Today’s Enterprises
“Empires are not lost because of weak strategy. They fall because leaders confuse motion with progress.”
The General Who Never Had a Gantt Chart
Napoleon Bonaparte, one of history’s greatest military leaders, never had dashboards, Jira boards, or programme reviews.
What he did have was rarer: clarity, speed, and relentless execution.
Again and again, he defeated coalitions that outnumbered him two to one. His secret wasn’t mystical genius. It was discipline. He concentrated effort on decisive battles, adapted faster than anyone else, and built systems that made execution inevitable.
Sound familiar? It should. CIOs, COOs, and CEOs face the same paradox today.
I hear the same statements coming from boardrooms across industries:
“We have too many priorities.”
“We can’t adapt fast enough.”
“Delivery is always playing catch-up.”
And just like Napoleon’s opponents, many organisations mistake size for advantage. They believe throwing more people and more projects into the mix will increase their chances of success.
History, and modern performance data, suggest otherwise.
Napoleon’s principles of winning map directly to the enterprise challenge of today: Focus. Adaptability. Execution. Ignore these, and you’ll suffer his fate in Russia - an empire overstretched, and finally undone by its own complexity.
1. Focus: Concentrating Power at the Point of Impact
At the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, Napoleon lured the larger Austro-Russian army into spreading themselves thin. Then he massed his forces at the decisive point, smashing through the enemy centre and routing them. Outnumbered but not out-focused, he won one of the most brilliant victories in military history.
Most organisations do the opposite. They scatter their resources across dozens of initiatives, each clamouring for budget and headcount. Leadership feels busy, the portfolio looks impressive, but nothing actually moves the needle.
Focus is not about doing more with less. It’s about doing fewer things with greater impact. Napoleon didn’t try to fight everywhere at once - he chose the decisive battle.
For modern enterprises, focus means:
Prioritising strategic bets and putting your best people on them.
Killing projects that don’t connect clearly to (the right) outcomes.
Aligning the organisation behind a shared goal, not diluting it across a portfolio of pet initiatives.
Executives often fear that saying “no” will stall innovation. In reality, it’s the opposite: saying “yes” too often spreads innovation so thin that nothing materialises.
Executive Question: Are you concentrating your best people on the few battles that will define your future - or scattering them across initiatives no one will remember in two years’ time?
2. Adaptability: Winning in Fluid Environments
Napoleon’s genius wasn’t rigid planning; it was agility. He was famous for writing plans that looked deceptively simple, and for changing them the moment conditions shifted. His armies marched faster than his enemies could react, turning battles into a game of cat and mouse where he was always two moves ahead.
Too many organisations confuse strategy with a budget spreadsheet. They treat plans as fixed documents to be defended, not working hypotheses to be tested. The moment the market shifts, they’re paralysed by sunk costs and outdated commitments.
Napoleon understood something that every executive should tattoo on their office wall: no plan survives first contact.
Adaptability in business means:
Shortening feedback loops so reality can inform decisions quickly.
Updating priorities based on evidence, not politics or last year’s forecasts.
Building a culture where changing direction is seen as strength, not weakness.
It’s striking how often I see the opposite. Teams are told to “be agile,” yet their leadership insists on defending old roadmaps long after the world has moved on. The result is organisations that are technically busy but strategically irrelevant.
Executive Question: When the market shifts, do your teams adjust in weeks - or are you still debating last year’s budget assumptions while your competitors sprint past you?
3. Execution: Discipline That Turns Strategy into Outcomes
Napoleon’s brilliance didn’t stop at the battlefield. His real secret weapon was logistics. He built systems that allowed his armies to move faster than anyone else. Soldiers carried their own supplies, local resources were carefully mapped, and movements were coordinated with precision.
That discipline meant his forces didn’t just plan bold campaigns - they executed them.
Modern organisations often stumble here. They create compelling strategies, then assume execution will simply happen through “alignment” or good intentions.
What follows is the all-too-familiar theatre of status reports, PowerPoint updates, and heroic efforts to plug systemic gaps.
Execution discipline means:
Building an operating model that reliably connects strategy to delivery.
Measuring outcomes, not activity.
Removing friction so talent is spent on value creation, not navigating bureaucracy.
Holding leaders accountable for results, not slideware.
It’s fashionable to talk about “empowering teams” or “being outcome-focused.” But empowerment without systems is abdication. And outcome-focus without execution discipline is wishful thinking. Napoleon knew this, which is why he spent as much time on supply lines as on strategy.
Executive Question: Do you have a delivery system that turns intent into outcomes - or are you relying on heroes and spreadsheets?
The Cautionary Tale: Napoleon’s Russia, and Your Portfolio
For all his genius, Napoleon eventually broke his own rules. In 1812, he invaded Russia with a massive force. He ignored logistics, underestimated the environment, and overstretched his resources. The result was disaster: starvation, attrition, and ultimate collapse.
This wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of abandoning focus, adaptability, and execution discipline - the very principles that had built his empire.
Organisations make the same mistake every day:
Launching too many initiatives at once.
Refusing to adapt to market shifts or competitor moves.
Treating execution as a side effect rather than a core discipline.
The outcome is predictable: bloated portfolios, missed opportunities, and declining competitiveness.
The lesson is stark: ignoring these principles is not just inefficient - it’s fatal.
The Enterprise as a Campaign
Napoleon’s genius lay in uniting vision, adaptability, and execution into one coherent system. That is exactly what high-performing organisations need today.
Focus gives clarity of purpose.
Adaptability ensures resilience in uncertainty.
Execution delivers measurable outcomes.
When these three operate together, enterprises don’t just survive - they outpace larger, better-funded rivals.
Most companies don’t lose because they lack resources. They lose because they dilute focus, fail to adapt, or let execution collapse into theatre.
Napoleon showed that winning with less is possible - if you master these three disciplines.
Conclusion: Empires Fall, but Principles Endure
Napoleon eventually lost his empire. But the principles that made him unstoppable for over a decade are timeless.
For today’s executives, the challenge is the same:
Will you spread your forces thin, or concentrate on the decisive battles?
Will you adapt faster than your rivals, or defend outdated plans?
Will you execute with discipline, or rely on heroic effort?
The enterprises that master focus, adaptability, and execution will not only win - they’ll build resilience in a world where conditions change faster than any budget cycle.
The rest? They’ll discover their own Russia - too late, and at too high a cost.”
So ask yourself: Are you running an empire of backlogs, or leading a campaign to win the few battles that matter?
