What HBR’s Own 2026 Research Says That Its Recycled 2023 Article Does Not
By Jon W. Hansen · Procurement Insights · April 2026
This week, Harvard Business Review posted a 2023 article on LinkedIn. In 2026. The article is titled “10 Ways to Prove You’re a Strategic Thinker.” It frames strategic thinking as a communication and perception problem — you can’t just think strategically, you need to speak strategically too.
That would be unremarkable, except for one thing.
HBR’s own 2026 research says something completely different.
Their January 2026 executive survey found that the primary obstacles to AI success are persistent issues around change and human and organizational readiness. Their Strategy Summit in February 2026 concluded that AI transformation fails because incentives, talent strategies, and trust are not considered thoroughly enough before the commitment is made. At Hansen, we call that Phase 0™. Their March 2026 piece documented researchers asking LLMs for strategic advice and receiving what they called “trendslop” — polished output that looks strategic but isn’t.
Here is the contradiction: the 2023 article says the problem is that leaders don’t communicate or demonstrate actual strategic thinking in action. HBR’s own 2026 research says the problem is that organizations aren’t ready — governance, trust, and human conditions fail before the technology is ever deployed. One says speak better. The other says prepare better. Those are not the same prescription. Speaking better changes how you are perceived. Preparing better changes what actually happens.
HBR’s 2023 article is the trigger for this post. But what follows is not a critique of HBR. It is a reframing of what strategic thinking actually is — and what it has always required.
The Theater Problem In Procurement
The 2023 article is well-intentioned. The ten behaviors it describes are real. Elevating your perspective. Being forward-looking. Using analogies and metaphors. Stimulating strategic dialogue. These are not bad things.
But the framing has a foundational problem: it treats strategic thinking as a performance directed at other people. The goal is that key people in your organization perceive you as leadership material. That is a career-advancement problem. It is not the problem the Procurement Insights archive has been documenting for 27 years.
The CFO and CIO dimensions of this same problem are equally well-documented — and equally unaddressed. Upcoming posts in the CFO Insights and CIO Insights series will examine what the archive shows about each.
And theater, in procurement and supply chain, has a well-documented cost.
The 2007 CFO survey — referenced in the Procurement Insights archive and reverified in 2009 and 2012 with worse results each time — found that fewer than 20 percent of CFOs considered procurement to have a very positive impact on competitiveness. Only 46 percent felt procurement had contributed to enterprise growth.
And Deloitte’s own CPO Survey — which the archive has tracked across multiple cycles from 2016 through 2025 — found that 62 percent or more of CPOs consistently reported their teams lacked the skills to deliver on their procurement strategy. Not once. Across nearly a decade of surveys. Deloitte kept wrapping the same finding in a new package. The skills gap never closed. The strategic communication never stopped. The outcomes never followed.
Procurement professionals had not stopped speaking strategically in that period. The communication behaviors were present. The outcomes were not. Because outcomes are never determined by communication behaviors. They are determined by whether the right questions were asked before the commitment was made.
What the Archive Actually Shows
In 2007, I wrote about the Virginia eVA program — already one of the most successful public sector eProcurement initiatives in North America. Bob Sievert, one of the key architects of the eVA and the former CIO of NASPO, articulated the reason for its success in terms that have stayed with me for nearly two decades: they avoided the trap of eVA becoming a software project. They shifted the emphasis from cost justification to process understanding and refinement. eVA’s effectiveness had little to do with the technology and more to do with the methodology the Virginia brain trust employed.
Nobody in that room was performing strategic communication for senior leadership. They were asking the right questions before the commitment was made.
In 1998, I was engaged by SHL/MCI Worldcom to support the Department of National Defence using an SR&ED-funded diagnostic. The procurement function was underperforming. Delivery was at 51 percent. The strategically communicated assumption was that the technology platform was inadequate.
I asked one question.
What time of day do orders come in?
That question was not elevated in its perspective. It did not use metaphors or stimulate strategic dialogue. It was a diagnostic question that nobody thought to ask — because everyone was focused on the technology solution, not the governance conditions underneath it.
Delivery performance moved from 51 percent to 97.3 percent in three months. No new technology was deployed until after the 3-month results were confirmed. The performance was sustained for seven years. The technology came later — introduced not to fix a broken model, but to scale a proven one. That is the only condition under which technology delivers what a vendor promises.
The diagnostic was everything. The results overshadowed the strategic communication.
Getting It Right Versus Being Right
The 2023 HBR article is fundamentally about being right — or more precisely, about being seen as right. It is a guide to performing strategic credibility in front of an audience.
Getting it right is a different discipline entirely. It means asking the questions nobody thought to ask. It means running the diagnostic before the contract is signed. It means recognizing that the governance conditions underneath the initiative determine the outcome — and that no amount of strategic communication changes those conditions.
In 2025, Patrick Marlow of Google put it in terms the procurement community immediately recognized: imagine buying a new Corvette, driving it into a lake, then blaming Chevy because it won’t float. Replace Corvette and Chevy with LLM and any model provider, and that is exactly what is happening across the industry right now.
The organizations getting AI wrong are not bad communicators. Many are excellent communicators. They can elevate their perspective, be forward-looking, and use metaphors with the best of them. They simply did not ask the right questions before they committed.
HBR’s own 2026 research confirms it. The obstacle to AI success is not insufficient strategic communication. It is organizational readiness — the same pre-commitment condition the archive has been assessing since 1998.
The Ten Ways Are Not Wrong — They Are Downstream
To be fair to the 2023 article: connecting disparate concepts, practicing strategic listening, seeking feedback — these are genuine capabilities that matter in organizational settings. They help an answer land. They help decisions get acted upon.
But they cannot substitute for the diagnostic work that happens before the commitment. The 2023 article was written for people who think strategically but are not being heard. The archive has been documenting something different: organizations that sounded strategic, checked every governance box, and got it wrong anyway.
Across seven consecutive technology eras.
The list was not wrong.
The list was perfunctory.
Perfunctory is worse than wrong — because it creates the appearance of readiness without the substance of it.
By the Time You’re Proving You’re Strategic, the Decision Has Already Been Made
That is the sentence the 2023 article cannot address. Because it was never written for that problem.
The C-suite now faces a choice that no amount of strategic communication can resolve: sound strategic, or get it right. The archive has been documenting the cost of choosing the first when you needed the second. HBR’s own 2026 researchers are now documenting it too.
Phase 0™ exists in the space between those two choices — before the commitment, during the implementation, or inside the disruption. It does not teach you to speak strategically. It surfaces whether the governance conditions in your organization can sustain the outcome you are about to commit to producing.
Ten questions. Under ten minutes. Free immediate download.
→ Download the Phase 0™ Diagnostic
If what you have read here resonates — if you recognize your organization in the pattern the archive has been documenting since 1998 — let’s have a 30-minute conversation about where you actually sit.
→ Book a Readiness Conversation
Jon W. Hansen is the founder of Procurement Insights, publishing since 2007 with 3,300+ documents and zero vendor sponsorships. He is the creator of Phase 0™, the Hansen Fit Score™, and RAM 2025™. His work was independently validated by the former head of the Stanford HAI AI Index research team.
Related Archive Posts
© 2026 Jon W. Hansen · Procurement Insights · Hansen Models™ RAM 2025™ Validated · procureinsights.com
-30-
Procurement Insights 
The Difference Between Sounding Strategic and Being Strategic
Posted on April 12, 2026
0
What HBR’s Own 2026 Research Says That Its Recycled 2023 Article Does Not
By Jon W. Hansen · Procurement Insights · April 2026
This week, Harvard Business Review posted a 2023 article on LinkedIn. In 2026. The article is titled “10 Ways to Prove You’re a Strategic Thinker.” It frames strategic thinking as a communication and perception problem — you can’t just think strategically, you need to speak strategically too.
That would be unremarkable, except for one thing.
HBR’s own 2026 research says something completely different.
Their January 2026 executive survey found that the primary obstacles to AI success are persistent issues around change and human and organizational readiness. Their Strategy Summit in February 2026 concluded that AI transformation fails because incentives, talent strategies, and trust are not considered thoroughly enough before the commitment is made. At Hansen, we call that Phase 0™. Their March 2026 piece documented researchers asking LLMs for strategic advice and receiving what they called “trendslop” — polished output that looks strategic but isn’t.
Here is the contradiction: the 2023 article says the problem is that leaders don’t communicate or demonstrate actual strategic thinking in action. HBR’s own 2026 research says the problem is that organizations aren’t ready — governance, trust, and human conditions fail before the technology is ever deployed. One says speak better. The other says prepare better. Those are not the same prescription. Speaking better changes how you are perceived. Preparing better changes what actually happens.
HBR’s 2023 article is the trigger for this post. But what follows is not a critique of HBR. It is a reframing of what strategic thinking actually is — and what it has always required.
The Theater Problem In Procurement
The 2023 article is well-intentioned. The ten behaviors it describes are real. Elevating your perspective. Being forward-looking. Using analogies and metaphors. Stimulating strategic dialogue. These are not bad things.
But the framing has a foundational problem: it treats strategic thinking as a performance directed at other people. The goal is that key people in your organization perceive you as leadership material. That is a career-advancement problem. It is not the problem the Procurement Insights archive has been documenting for 27 years.
The CFO and CIO dimensions of this same problem are equally well-documented — and equally unaddressed. Upcoming posts in the CFO Insights and CIO Insights series will examine what the archive shows about each.
And theater, in procurement and supply chain, has a well-documented cost.
The 2007 CFO survey — referenced in the Procurement Insights archive and reverified in 2009 and 2012 with worse results each time — found that fewer than 20 percent of CFOs considered procurement to have a very positive impact on competitiveness. Only 46 percent felt procurement had contributed to enterprise growth.
And Deloitte’s own CPO Survey — which the archive has tracked across multiple cycles from 2016 through 2025 — found that 62 percent or more of CPOs consistently reported their teams lacked the skills to deliver on their procurement strategy. Not once. Across nearly a decade of surveys. Deloitte kept wrapping the same finding in a new package. The skills gap never closed. The strategic communication never stopped. The outcomes never followed.
Procurement professionals had not stopped speaking strategically in that period. The communication behaviors were present. The outcomes were not. Because outcomes are never determined by communication behaviors. They are determined by whether the right questions were asked before the commitment was made.
What the Archive Actually Shows
In 2007, I wrote about the Virginia eVA program — already one of the most successful public sector eProcurement initiatives in North America. Bob Sievert, one of the key architects of the eVA and the former CIO of NASPO, articulated the reason for its success in terms that have stayed with me for nearly two decades: they avoided the trap of eVA becoming a software project. They shifted the emphasis from cost justification to process understanding and refinement. eVA’s effectiveness had little to do with the technology and more to do with the methodology the Virginia brain trust employed.
Nobody in that room was performing strategic communication for senior leadership. They were asking the right questions before the commitment was made.
In 1998, I was engaged by SHL/MCI Worldcom to support the Department of National Defence using an SR&ED-funded diagnostic. The procurement function was underperforming. Delivery was at 51 percent. The strategically communicated assumption was that the technology platform was inadequate.
I asked one question.
What time of day do orders come in?
That question was not elevated in its perspective. It did not use metaphors or stimulate strategic dialogue. It was a diagnostic question that nobody thought to ask — because everyone was focused on the technology solution, not the governance conditions underneath it.
Delivery performance moved from 51 percent to 97.3 percent in three months. No new technology was deployed until after the 3-month results were confirmed. The performance was sustained for seven years. The technology came later — introduced not to fix a broken model, but to scale a proven one. That is the only condition under which technology delivers what a vendor promises.
The diagnostic was everything. The results overshadowed the strategic communication.
Getting It Right Versus Being Right
The 2023 HBR article is fundamentally about being right — or more precisely, about being seen as right. It is a guide to performing strategic credibility in front of an audience.
Getting it right is a different discipline entirely. It means asking the questions nobody thought to ask. It means running the diagnostic before the contract is signed. It means recognizing that the governance conditions underneath the initiative determine the outcome — and that no amount of strategic communication changes those conditions.
In 2025, Patrick Marlow of Google put it in terms the procurement community immediately recognized: imagine buying a new Corvette, driving it into a lake, then blaming Chevy because it won’t float. Replace Corvette and Chevy with LLM and any model provider, and that is exactly what is happening across the industry right now.
The organizations getting AI wrong are not bad communicators. Many are excellent communicators. They can elevate their perspective, be forward-looking, and use metaphors with the best of them. They simply did not ask the right questions before they committed.
HBR’s own 2026 research confirms it. The obstacle to AI success is not insufficient strategic communication. It is organizational readiness — the same pre-commitment condition the archive has been assessing since 1998.
The Ten Ways Are Not Wrong — They Are Downstream
To be fair to the 2023 article: connecting disparate concepts, practicing strategic listening, seeking feedback — these are genuine capabilities that matter in organizational settings. They help an answer land. They help decisions get acted upon.
But they cannot substitute for the diagnostic work that happens before the commitment. The 2023 article was written for people who think strategically but are not being heard. The archive has been documenting something different: organizations that sounded strategic, checked every governance box, and got it wrong anyway.
Across seven consecutive technology eras.
The list was not wrong.
The list was perfunctory.
Perfunctory is worse than wrong — because it creates the appearance of readiness without the substance of it.
By the Time You’re Proving You’re Strategic, the Decision Has Already Been Made
That is the sentence the 2023 article cannot address. Because it was never written for that problem.
The C-suite now faces a choice that no amount of strategic communication can resolve: sound strategic, or get it right. The archive has been documenting the cost of choosing the first when you needed the second. HBR’s own 2026 researchers are now documenting it too.
Phase 0™ exists in the space between those two choices — before the commitment, during the implementation, or inside the disruption. It does not teach you to speak strategically. It surfaces whether the governance conditions in your organization can sustain the outcome you are about to commit to producing.
Ten questions. Under ten minutes. Free immediate download.
→ Download the Phase 0™ Diagnostic
If what you have read here resonates — if you recognize your organization in the pattern the archive has been documenting since 1998 — let’s have a 30-minute conversation about where you actually sit.
→ Book a Readiness Conversation
Jon W. Hansen is the founder of Procurement Insights, publishing since 2007 with 3,300+ documents and zero vendor sponsorships. He is the creator of Phase 0™, the Hansen Fit Score™, and RAM 2025™. His work was independently validated by the former head of the Stanford HAI AI Index research team.
Related Archive Posts
© 2026 Jon W. Hansen · Procurement Insights · Hansen Models™ RAM 2025™ Validated · procureinsights.com
-30-
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