Okuzeka
Management & Leadership vocabulary · Strategy and Planning

Strategic drift

Meaning in management & leadership, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In management & leadership, strategic drift means: The gradual loss of fit between an organisation's strategy and its changing environment.

In Turkish: stratejik sürüklenme

How it is used

Use when familiar incremental adjustments fail to keep pace with wider changes in the market.

Example sentences

  1. Years of strategic drift left the retailer serving customers who had already moved online.

    A strategy becomes less relevant through accumulated environmental change.

  2. The board saw strategic drift in the gap between its ageing products and new buyer expectations.

    The mismatch concerns strategic relevance rather than a missed operational target.

Common collocations

  • recognise strategic drift
  • avoid strategic drift
  • strategyA long-term plan that sets out where an organisation wants to go and the main choices it will make to get there, such as which markets to enter and what to stop doing.
  • competitive advantageSomething that allows a company to do better than its competitors, such as lower costs, a stronger brand, better technology or more skilled people.

More terms: Strategy and Planning

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: