The retailer's turnaround won't be decided by the boldness of its strategy, but by whether thousands of daily decisions point the same direction.

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By any traditional measure, Target doesn’t lack for strategic thinking. Like most large companies, it has talented executives, sophisticated data and a steady cadence of planning designed to keep it competitive with rivals such as Walmart and Amazon.

Yet the retailer now finds itself in a familiar corporate moment — a new CEO unveiling a new direction meant to restore momentum after a stretch of uneven performance, changing consumer expectations and fierce competitive pressure across the retail landscape. The real question isn’t whether Target has a good strategy, but whether it can execute it.

Biologists often point out that humans share roughly 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. Only about 2% separates us, yet that small difference accounts for language, complex societies and the ability to reshape the world around us. The gap is tiny, but the impact is enormous. Organizations aren’t much different.

Across corporate America, most companies share the same 98% of organizational DNA. They employ talented people, produce thoughtful strategic plans and launch initiatives designed to move the business forward. Walk through the halls of ten different companies and much of what you see would look remarkably familiar. Yet the outcomes vary dramatically — some organizations consistently adapt and translate strategy into coordinated action, while others move just as quickly and stay busy but struggle to convert ambition into meaningful progress.

The difference usually isn’t a dramatically better strategy or a once-in-a-generation leader. More often, the difference lives in the 2% of organizational DNA that determines whether strategy becomes action—or quietly dissolves into well-intentioned activity. That 2% is clarity.

Clarity about what must change, what behaviors matter most, how decisions should be made and how tradeoffs should be evaluated. And clarity about how each team and individual contributes to forward momentum.

How Execution Drift takes hold

When that clarity exists, something powerful happens inside organizations. People understand not just what the strategy is, but how it should influence their everyday choices. When clarity is missing, organizations experience something else entirely: Execution Drift.

Execution Drift rarely shows up as resistance. It appears when a strategy begins to move through an organization and gradually loses its shape along the way. Each department interprets it slightly differently. Existing incentives pull attention back toward familiar work. Over time, the strategy that once seemed clear becomes diluted.

In a retailer as large as Target, that drift can take many forms. For instance, take their renewed push to improve the in-store experience. Merchandising teams might respond by introducing more displays, seasonal collections and product launches designed to create discovery. Marketing might spotlight curated in-store moments and exclusive finds. At the same time, store operations, under pressure to manage costs, may tighten labor hours and prioritize faster checkout times. Digital teams might encourage more customers to use order pickup or drive-up, shifting traffic away from browsing the store entirely.

Each decision makes sense within its own function, but those actions can pull the business in different directions. Internally, teams work toward different definitions of what a “better store experience” actually means. Externally, customers may walk into stores that promise inspiration and service but feel understaffed or cluttered. The strategy may be sound, but without clarity guiding everyday decisions, the effort to improve the store experience can quickly become fragmented.

No leader intends for this to happen. It’s simply what occurs when clarity isn’t strong enough to anchor decisions across a complex system.

This is why so many leaders feel frustrated after announcing a strategic shift. They’ve communicated the strategy and explained the vision. Yet months later, the day-to-day decisions across the organization still resemble the past. The strategy exists but the organizational DNA hasn’t shifted enough to support it.

Why most strategies fail before they start

What’s fascinating is that meaningful change often doesn’t require reinventing the entire organization. Much like that 2% difference in DNA, small shifts in clarity can dramatically alter how a system behaves. When leaders sharpen clarity around priorities, tradeoffs and decision rules, teams begin to interpret strategy in the same way. The organization starts moving with greater coherence.

The visible structures of the company may remain largely the same, including people, tools and processes. But the 2% that guides how decisions are made has changed.

Target’s new strategy will inevitably be judged by store traffic, margins, inventory levels and digital growth. But the deeper test will be less visible. Can the company create enough organizational clarity for thousands of daily decisions to reinforce the same direction?

Because in modern retail as in any industry, strategy fails when the small difference between intention and execution is never fully addressed. And over time, that 2% difference is what separates organizations that talk about strategy from those that actually bring it to life.

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