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The CEO paces a conference room, brandishing a thick report. He gazes impatiently at his senior managers. "You've all read this," he says. "Top-shelf consultants. Two million bucks. Pure Strategic thinking. This could put us years ahead.

"The board is psyched. I'm psyched. It's a brilliant plan. One question: Given our current technology, is this implementable?"

The response, from five different chairs in the room: "No." The CEO looks frustrated; he doesn't look surprised.

Why would he be? The moment neatly captures the big problem of corporate strategy: the gap between the brilliant plan and the actual execution.

Having difficulty getting great strategies implemented is so commonplace that the above moment with the CEO came not from a recent corporate meeting but from popular culture: It's a television ad for IBM. It's IBM, global behemoth and regular information-technology consultant, mocking the corporate tendency to turn great ideas into three-ring binders that end up as doorstops.

As the commercial fades, one of the CEO's lieutenants asks, "Still psyched?" Corporate strategy played for laughs. IBM meets Dilbert.

What the IBM ad doesn't say is that the company has been working on the biggest problem in strategy not by rethinking strategy, but by working on the biggest problem in computing. For years, information technology has been mired in the details instead of focused on the goals (anyone who's ever spent an hour trying to change email settings knows that). The one thing that computing is not is computerized. IBM is starting to think about goal-oriented computing, where you tell the computers what you want to do and let them work out the details. Strategy and implementation are literally merged: Come up with the strategy, and the implementation is automated.

IBM is breaking down strategy and implementation into smaller pieces, letting each component know the goals, monitor its own performance, and do some problem solving. At IBM, this merger of strategy and implementation became known as "SMASH": simple, many, self-healing. The most effective computers would be made of many small, interchangeable components with the ability to monitor their own performance and solve problems as they arise rather than wait for instructions from the central processor: headquarters. Biology was IBM's inspiration. A hangnail doesn't prevent you from typing; the flu doesn't prevent you from walking. Similarly, a small software or hardware problem shouldn't bring computing to a halt.

SMASH could work equally well as an approach to corporate strategy. Imagine a company that develops its strategy and embraces SMASH. No all-controlling central brain. No separation of thinkers and doers. A biological approach to finding and solving problems, a way to make the company "self-healing."

Now, a couple of years later, the problem that inspired SMASH at IBM is still being solved. Meanwhile, the ideas that SMASH inspired are driving a dramatic new approach throughout IBM's R&D labs, where IBMers talk about "autonomic computing," a new branch of information technology. In the human body, the autonomic nervous system is the one that operates behind the scenes, without conscious thought. It regulates everything from the amount of light that enters into your eyes to the immune response to disease.