Dan Page
Walking through a Kroger, the US grocery store, you notice a small group dressed in business attire, standing in the beverage aisle and looking at the shelves. They don’t appear to be Kroger employees, yet they’re animated as they note which products are available, where the merchandise is located in the store and on the shelves, and whether the various brands and packages are easy to reach. What’s going on?
When browsing in an Apple store, you see another group of executives. They seem to be watching customers navigate the store, noting how the visitors handle new devices, when they pause, and if they struggle. Does it seem odd that customers are being watched?
On a visit to a large proprietary trading company, you discover that before taking a position in a new commodity, one of the senior partners “paper trades” the item for a significant period of time, simulating investments in real market conditions but not actually putting any money in. Why does a deeply experienced investor spend so much time and effort on an activity that doesn’t pay out?
While shopping at your favorite Walmart, you are unhappy because they are out of stock on Del Monte cans of Salt-Free Sweet Peas. You wonder why the shelf has been left bare. Why not fill the empty space with a suitable substitute?
Strategy is one of those concepts, like vision, value, and quality, that everyone in the corporate world wants more of yet few are certain exactly how to apply. The funny thing about strategy is that it’s everywhere, but we hardly see it. For most of us, we rarely think about it. And at times, we’re not quite sure what it is and isn’t.
This mystery may stem from how we perceive the role of strategy in the life of an organization. All too often, strategy is depicted as something that emerges from on high and trickles down through the ranks, where it somehow gets transformed into the tactics that inform day-to-day execution. Leadership is usually thought of as involving high-powered mission creation, the establishment of a corporate North Star that magically guides the entire enterprise toward some goal or target.
Some management teams spend most of their time looking at slide decks rather than seeing business in action.
This sort of thinking envisages a realm of strategic leaders and a somewhat separate world of practitioners who take orders or translate abstract directives into tangible actions, with little meaningful interaction between the two groups.
This division may reflect the way that the subject has long been taught in universities—as a theoretical construct, typically conveyed by academic researchers or college instructors. While they may have terrific ideas, such professors have often had little opportunity to see strategy in action in the real world.
There are certainly organizations that are run in this bifurcated way, with a strict demarcation between strategic leaders and tactical administrators, but their executives are acting with a limited strategic understanding. They are lacking arguably the most important perspective of all—that of how customers use and value the products and services they offer.
In contrast to the more academic approach, the idea of “strategy as practice” promises a view of strategy in play. The deliciously simple idea is to drive strategic decisions down through the organization so these critical choices are made at the “coalface” of your industry. These are the spots where your strategic plans are transformed, for better or worse, into action.
Think about it: Rather than sitting in conference rooms talking about the numbers, go to where the battles are fought and open your eyes. This is something that board members, for example, rarely do—they are typically more comfortable staying in the corporate office than going to the front lines. Some management teams similarly spend most of their time looking at slide decks rather than seeing business in action. Consultants often prefer to look through documents and filings than visit facilities and branches.
That is a mistake. For the executives of Coca-Cola, scheduling meetings in grocery stores is a feature, not a bug. It enables them to check where Coke products sit, how competitors are displayed, and whether the brand’s promise comes alive—are the products available within an arm’s reach of desire? These visits provide an immediate and unimpeachable look at strategy.
Coke’s executives know how much this matters. The practice traces its origins to the company’s legendary leader Robert Woodruff, who served as president from 1923 to 1955. It was maintained by Donald Keough, Coca-Cola’s president and COO during the “cola wars” of the 1980s. And it was strengthened in 1994, when, according to the Wall Street Journal, Douglas Ivester, head of Coca-Cola’s North American operations, went on a fact-finding visit to Rome, Georgia, the town with the highest per-capita consumption in the world—its residents on average drank three Cokes a day.
Ivester filmed his trip in a video titled “Road to Rome.” One key observation was that in the area around Rome, customers were not always being offered Coca-Cola. Ivester found a Ford dealership, a video store, and a karate studio where Coke wasn’t for sale. Simply making sure the product was being sold would boost Coke consumption there, and, by extension, anywhere, Ivester concluded. Three years later, Ivester was appointed the company’s chairman and CEO. Part of his legacy—and that of Woodruff and Keough—is that Coca-Cola CEOs and executives make it a habit to visit stores to see how customers interact with the brand.
Empty shelves are data that are all too often hidden in plain sight.
Your visit to the proprietary trading company reveals why experienced investors spend time paper trading. It turns out that each market has its own hidden patterns, and no single model or memo captures all the nuances. Only experience trading specific commodities reveals what really moves prices. That’s strategy-as-practice driving experimentation into intelligence.
Apple stores represent a physical strategy. The size and height of every table, along with each lighting choice, are part of a system expressing the brand’s values. Apple executives don’t just talk about what they desire their customers to experience; they are actively watching for it. This feedback loop doesn’t run through layers of slide decks but via direct observation of human behavior. That’s strategy as practice.
Walmart believes product stockouts are a significant inconvenience for customers. Even so, when this happens, their policy is to leave shelves open rather than filling out-of-stock spots with different merchandise. Empty spaces send an instant signal to every Walmart employee who happens by the canned-vegetables aisle: Do we have more salt-free sweet peas in stock? If so, how quickly can we refill the shelf? If not, how soon can we get more delivered from the nearest distribution center? That bare shelf is strategy looking right at you, every time you walk by. No meeting needed. No written report required. Let’s fix this as fast as we can.
Walmart founder Sam Walton devised the strategy. He hated the idea of a shelf being empty, feeling that it broke a promise to the customer. But he felt it was more important to see how his employees responded to the empty shelf. Another retailer might put regular sweet peas in the space once occupied by the salt-free version. Not Walmart. Its staff were trained to walk the store looking for empty shelves as a way to prompt them to take initiative.
The strategies we’ve discussed are distinct. Coca-Cola and Apple engage in monitoring, aiming to find data to act on, and not relying on what they’re told by retailers or consultants. Walmart and the trading firm deploy a strategy of acting in order to learn something.
Both approaches are pure genius. The question is, what does strategy look like for your business? Empty shelves are data that are all too often hidden in plain sight. They are there if you look, but if you don’t look, you’ll miss them. If you have empty shelves in your organization, we suggest you find a way to get them to speak to you.
Deryck J. van Rensburg is CEO of Brandunloc and a former division president at The Coca-Cola Company. James E. Schrager is clinical professor of entrepreneurship and strategic management at Chicago Booth. Their study, “What Does Strategy-as-Practice Look Like? Is Coke It?” was published in the International Journal of Management Practice in 2026.
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