Strategic Drift: How Quiet Misalignment Erodes Capital

Strategic drift rarely looks like failure. It looks like progress that doesn’t compound. Most companies don’t lose their edge in a single, dramatic moment. Instead, performance slowly decouples from effort. Teams stay busy. Initiatives keep launching. Capital keeps getting deployed. And yet—returns diminish.

This is strategic drift: the silent erosion between what the market now rewards and how leadership allocates attention, capital, and operating capacity.