Adapt to Win: A Framework to Overcome Strategy Decay Using OKRs and Lean Portfolio Management

Many CEOs sheepishly concede that a year or two after their multimillion-dollar strategy con­sultants depart, their beautiful strategy has not been implemented in any meaningful way. Employees don’t know the strategy or what to focus on and portfolio investments aren’t aligned to desired outcomes. In Adapt to Win: A Framework to Overcome Strategy Decay Using OKRs and Lean Portfolio Management, executive and consultant Evan Campbell provides the first comprehensive framework to align investment and capacity allocation decisions to corporate strategy using OKRs as the steel thread to ensure investments realize ­strategic objectives.

The book introduces strategy fundamentals before demonstrating why OKRs are the optimal tool for aligning strategy with execution. Campbell then delivers extensive guidance on Lean portfolio management principles and practices. You’ll learn rules and principles for supply side capacity management and techniques to improve delivery capabilities. The portfolio demand section addresses defining and shaping portfolios, aligning portfolios to strategy, and assigning strategic and financial value to prioritize initiative candidates. The portfolio matching and governance section explains how to optimally allocate scarce capacity to infinite demand and establish effective tracking and governance. Chapters also address product portfolio management, including the critical project-to-product shift, innovation portfolio management through directed innovation and innovation ecosystems, and corporate IT portfolio management.

Beyond portfolio management, Adapt to Win addresses organizational coherence by optimizing business and operating models, building necessary capabilities and competencies, and establishing organizational fitness to realize strategy. It also examines Lean and Agile funding and budgeting methodologies like Beyond Budgeting.

Business leaders tasked with translating strategy into results will find Adapt to Win essential. It’s the completely original and previously unpublished manual that bridges the gap between strategic intent and day-to-day execution, ensuring investments and payroll spend deliver leaders’ strategic outcomes to compete, adapt, and win.

Praise for Adapt to Win

“In this exceptional volume, Adapt to Win, Evan C. Campbell presents a profound and integrated blueprint for solving one of the most persistent challenges in modern enterprises: turning strategy into meaningful, measurable results…. With rare depth and practical precision, Campbell offers not just theory but a unifying system for leaders committed to achieving strategic coherence, accelerating execution, and building organizations that can thrive amidst complexity.”
―GENE GENDEL, Product and Business Agility Coach

“In Adapt to Win, Evan Campbell presents the ‘Big Picture’ of portfolio management … he puts portfolio management in the most explicit strategic context I’ve seen, and includes an extensive tool kit for prioritizing projects in that light. It’s like sitting down with a deeply experienced consultant/portfolio and investment manager and getting the real goods!”
―DANIEL J. MONTGOMERY, Managing Director, Agile Strategies and Author of Start Less, Finish More

“Most strategy fails not because it’s wrong, but because it never survives the investment and prioritization decisions that follow. Adapt to Win exposes why that happens―and gives executives a concrete way to keep investments, capacity, and accountability aligned to what actually drives bottom-line results.”
―JASON MOLESWORTH, CEO and Chief AI Strategist, Accelerated Innovation

“Written from the unique perspective of a business leader who has had a seat at the portfolio table and a strategy consultant who has spent decades helping numerous organizations connect the dots from visionary strategy to focused results, Adapt to Win is the rare business book that leaders can apply immediately to improve their organization.”
―LUKE HOHMANN, Serial Entrepreneur, SAFe^® Fellow, and Author