The Three Gears of Great: Define, Design, Execute
When $37.8 Billion Goes Up in Smoke
In 2005, Sprint and Nextel merged with grand ambitions—combining Sprint's consumer reach with Nextel's business relationships to create a telecommunications powerhouse. On paper, the strategy made perfect sense. In reality, it became one of corporate America's most expensive failures.
The culprit? Misaligned gears. Sprint ran on CDMA technology while Nextel operated on iDEN—incompatible systems that couldn't integrate. Sprint's bureaucratic culture clashed with Nextel's entrepreneurial spirit. Despite a sound strategy, the underlying design and execution mechanisms were fundamentally broken.
The result: customer exodus, stock collapse, and a $30 billion write-off. The merger didn't create a competitor—it created a cautionary tale about what happens when you assume outcomes without ensuring your gears actually fit together.
The Three Gears Framework
Most business failures aren't strategic—they're mechanical. Companies build strategies without architecting the capabilities to execute them. They launch initiatives without connecting them back to strategic goals. They optimize processes that don't move the business forward.
Success requires three gears working in perfect synchronization:
Gear 1: Define the Business Gear 2: Design the Business Gear 3: Execute the Business
When these gears turn in harmony, they create a flywheel effect—each gear accelerating the others, building momentum over time. When they're misaligned, friction builds, systems break down, and value gets destroyed.
Gear One: Define the Business
This gear establishes your Mission, Vision, North Star, and Strategic Requirements. Your mission remains constant, but your vision evolves with market changes and customer feedback. Business architect Roger Burlton defines the North Star as 4-7 guiding statements that articulate where the organization is headed.
The test of alignment is simple: Can your leadership team collectively complete this sentence? "In order to achieve our strategy, it is critical that we are able to..."
If they can't, misalignment has already begun.
AI transforms how we stress-test strategy. Upload your mission, vision, and strategic requirements to create a custom GPT that acts as your strategic analyst. Have it interview you, play devil's advocate, or simulate competitive responses. You can iterate on strategy faster than ever before—but only if you have a clear starting point.
Gear Two: Design the Business
Strategy without architecture is just aspiration. This gear translates vision into blueprint through Business Architecture, Capability Modeling, Process Design, Policies, and KPIs.
Yet most organizations are immature here. Processes go undocumented. Capabilities remain unmapped. The result? Execution without direction—effort that doesn't connect to outcomes.
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AI revolutionizes business design by analyzing existing capabilities, identifying misalignments, and simulating design scenarios before human intervention is needed. Imagine an executive dashboard where you can adjust capability investments and immediately see the downstream impact on processes, metrics, and strategic outcomes.
This isn't far-fetched. We're approaching a future where leaders become puppet masters of their digital twins—turning knobs and seeing results in real-time simulation rather than risking the actual business.
Gear Three: Execute the Business
This is where strategy and design meet reality through Continuous Improvement and Hyperautomation. Velocity increases here, but only when execution traces back to strategic goals.
Without this connection, organizations chase shiny objects—implementing AI because it's trendy rather than because it advances specific capabilities. Agentic AI has massive potential, but applied without context, it pushes gears out of alignment.
When used responsibly, AI becomes the engine of hyperautomation—continuously monitoring performance, identifying bottlenecks, proposing improvements, and iterating through optimization cycles. Human judgment only engages at clear decision points, allowing this gear to reach maximum performance while staying aligned with strategy and design.
Finding Your Rhythm
Each gear operates at its natural pace:
Feedback flows from execution back to design, and from design back to strategy. This creates the flywheel effect—momentum that compounds over time.
The Business Flight Simulator
You wouldn't board a plane with a pilot who'd never used a flight simulator. Yet companies make multi-million-dollar bets every day without modeling the impact across their processes and capabilities.
Business simulation lets you test designs, stress-test strategies, and explore ripple effects before committing resources. It's the difference between flying blind and flying with precision.
Sprint and Nextel's technology incompatibility would have been immediately obvious in simulation. While cultural clashes might have persisted, at least one major source of failure could have been avoided—potentially saving billions.
Stop Guessing. Start Knowing.
The Three Gears framework isn't theoretical—it's mechanical. When gears align, flywheels spin faster. When they don't, systems seize up.
The choice is simple: simulate before you execute, or risk joining Sprint and Nextel in the corporate graveyard of misaligned ambitions.