Capital strategy is where value is really won or quietly destroyed.

Most capital projects fail for predictable reasons: weak portfolio discipline, misaligned strategy, and poor risk pricing at the front end. By the time cost overruns and delays show up, the outcome is already baked in. The greatest leverage in CapEx isn’t execution speed it is early capital allocation decisions. 

What stands out across sectors is how consistently projects miss on both cost and schedule, and how strongly pretax ROIC correlates with valuation. Capital misallocation doesn’t just hurt margins; it compounds into lower multiples. In competitive markets where ROIC barely clears the cost of capital, even small errors in project selection or sequencing have outsized valuation consequences.

The implication is straightforward: capital strategy, portfolio optimization, and ESG-aware risk management aren’t “nice to haves.” They are foundational to sustaining returns. The firms that win are the ones that link capital allocation tightly to strategy, stress-test portfolios against forward risks, and invest early in the enabler’s analytics, governance, and ways of working that prevent value leakage before construction even begins. CapEx outcomes don’t fail randomly, they fail systematically. And that makes them fixable for those willing to treat capital allocation as a strategic asset, not an annual budgeting exercise.