When business performance slows, sales results or individual execution are often blamed first.
JiHyun Kim, Founder of JiHyun & Company, argues that repeated volatility, conflicting explanations across teams, and problems that return after being “fixed” are often signs of a deeper structural constraint.
Drawing on her experience as a Korea General Manager and APAC commercial leader, she explains why strategy frequently breaks during execution, how decision rights and accountability become disconnected, and why CEOs must diagnose the real constraint before redesigning the organization.
Q1. When performance stalls, sales or individual execution is often blamed first. What are the clearest signs that the real constraint is structural?
It is common, and I don't deny that sales carries major accountability for performance. But it is not always a single function or a single individual. Structural problems rarely come from one source. They build up over time — a decision made three years ago for sensible reasons, a process designed for a smaller business that nobody revisited.
By the time performance stalls, several of these are interacting, and no single one looks like the cause.
In many cases it is genuinely hard to tell. That is why they get missed: fixing one thing never feels like enough to be confident performance will return. Everyone is looking
for the one thing to fix, and there isn't one. A few things suggest the problem is structural.
Sales delivery moves in both directions.
Missing, then significantly overdelivering, then missing again. That much inconsistency across consecutive quarters — or a mismatch between sales results and the other commercial KPIs — means something is going on underneath. Consistent shortfall can be a target-setting problem. Movement both ways usually means the business does
not know what is driving its own numbers.
Teams explain the same result differently.
Ask sales, marketing, and finance why the quarter came out as it did, and you get three answers that don't reconcile, each accurate from where that person sits. That is what a silo looks like — not conflict, but three explanations that cannot be added together. Often each team is managing its own set of numbers, with no single source of truth.
The commercial team does not fully own the month-end close.
Sometimes finance is reconciling the gap between what was sold and what gets reported. Sometimes one team managing a single channel effectively closes sales for the whole company. Either way, the commercial team no longer owns its numbers. In one business I ran, the gap between gross and net was around six percent and nobody could explain it — pricing sat in one function, reporting in another, with no shared logic between them.
And the clearest sign: the problem was fixed before, and it returned within two or three quarters, sometimes in a different team. Something was addressed. Nothing changed.
Q2. From your experience as a Korea GM and APAC commercial leader, what recurring organizational issues prevent a strong strategy from turning into actual results?
The most common one is a belief that strategy and implementation are two separate things. Many CEOs and leadership teams give far more attention to strategy development — comprehensive analysis, thorough reports. That work is critical. But it is only the first half of getting an actual result. Strategy gets decided, then it goes to the team to implement.
That handoff is where it breaks. What transfers is the conclusion. What doesn't transfer is the reasoning, and the hands-on guidance along the way — why this choice and not another, what the plan assumes about how the business actually runs.
The people executing are then making a hundred small judgment calls with no basis for making them. It doesn't fail loudly.
It drifts. This becomes more visible when a company brings in outside help, because the group that built the plan leaves. But the outsider is not the cause. The handoff is. And because the plan looks so complete and so reasonable, the working team gets blamed when results don't follow.
The related issue is the plan itself. Leaders often assume a plan built by a group of professionals is the logical first step, then find that plans which are well-argued and thoroughly analysed still don't work. They reflect the framework and the data rather than the operational reality, because the people writing them rarely see why the problems sit where they do inside the organization.
In my experience the people inside know more, and know better. What is usually missing is management connecting those dots from an execution standpoint. What makes strategy convert is the opposite of a handoff. The people who will execute are engaged while the thinking is still forming, so the plan reflects how the business really operates.
And the engagement continues after launch — through the point where the routine starts slipping and someone has to decide whether to hold or adjust. That is what makes a team self sufficient and sustainable, rather than dependent on external help.
This matters more now than it did five years ago. A convincing, well-structured plan is no longer hard to produce. AI can write one with robust analysis. What it cannot do is stay with the internal team through execution, when things are drifting and the right call isn't obvious.
Q3. When a company's growth slows, what should a CEO redesign first: decision rights, accountability, governance, or the operating model itself?
Diagnosis first, before any of them. The CEO needs to understand what actually triggered the stall, and why. Without that you only fix what is visible, and the same problem returns a few quarters later in a different form — harder to recognize because it doesn't look like the last one.
The four are not options to choose between. They are levers that make execution work as one system.
- Decision rights without accountability is advice — authority to decide, no consequence for deciding badly.
- Accountability without decision rights creates blame — carrying outcomes you were never allowed to determine.
- Governance without both becomes a meeting schedule rather than actual progress. The operating model is what holds all three together as the business grows.
Weaken one and the others quietly stop working. Working as one system does not mean changing everything at once. It means designing the operating model deliberately, so that strategy gets implemented and eventually becomes organizational behaviour and culture.
You can sequence the work. You cannot treat one lever as a substitute for the rest. Where to start, and how much the organization can absorb, is what the diagnosis determines. It differs by company, so I would not offer a universal answer. What I would say is that this work is expensive — not in money, but in time, in continuous communication, and in leadership attention held steady over months.
Even a CEO who genuinely wants it underestimates that. In practice, decision rights are often a workable entry point. They can be clarified without changing much structurally, and within a quarter they usually give the CEO a sense of where performance is drifting.
Starting to change things before the diagnosis is clear is the most expensive mistake I see. The business gets rebuilt around an assumption that turns out to be wrong, and now it carries the original problem plus a disrupted structure. Diagnose first, then sequence — knowing that what you leave until later will pull against what you fixed first.
Performance problems are rarely solved by applying more pressure, adding more reports, or replacing one individual.
Without a clear diagnosis, organizational changes may address only the visible symptoms, allowing the same problem to return in a different form. JiHyun Kim’s central message is straightforward: diagnose first, then sequence the change.
Strategy must be developed with the people responsible for execution, while decision rights, accountability, and governance must operate as part of one deliberate operating model.
The first step toward improving performance is not deciding whom to blame. It is understanding the structure in which people are being asked to make decisions and deliver results.
