Strategy
I’ve been having conversations about strategy and tactics lately. Projects are launching soon and I’m planning for SOBCon2010 — Strategy and Tactics are going to be a big part of the content. That’s sent me on some blissful research and some not so lovely mind searching — realizing I had some strategic work of my own to be doing.
As strategy became my main topic of conversation, I came to the following realizations:
- We don’t learn or teach good decision making in schools.
- Most folks make random decisions.
- Most folks confuse tactics with strategy — basically thinking they’re the same thing.
- Few folks think of strategy as opportunity mining.
- Few folks have a strategy that fully leverages their unique position.
Tactics are interesting. The accomplishments they bring can be thrilling. But the bigger picture that a strategic mission lays out is powerful and amazing thinking.
Is Your Strategy About Finding Opportunities?
Strategy isn’t a plan, a decision, a goal, a destination.
It’s a tool for leveraging who you are, what you know, where you are, the environment, and how people think and respond to each other. Strategy is a system for improving your position.
- Have a Mission — set an ultimate philosophical, economical, and / or political purpose
- Assess Your Position — Look, listen, measure, test your current situation, climate, resources, opportunities
- Move Forward Tactically in Increments — Size, choose, and commit to campaigns that reflect obstacles, goals, and prizes
- Celebrate and Record Your Winnings — All progress is good.
Strategy is based on the idea that you have a unique place in the world. All opportunities flow from that position. — Gary Gagliardi
All strategy is discovering, choosing, taking advantage of, and winning opportunities.
Strategic perspective can light unique and unexpected pathways.
Have you looked at your strategic mission lately?
Is your strategy about winning opportunities?
Are you leveraging your unique position?
I make connections.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to do some strategic thinking?
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I haven’t generally liked to use the term “tactics”. Following the thread of your post, I think the reason I haven’t is precisely to your point that tactics and strategy are often confused and incorrectly used interchangeably.
Strategy has to come first before you can even consider looking to tactics.
Tactics, to me, also implies a negative connotation. Rightly or wrongly, I worry that energy spent trying to manipulate a situation is not a long term approach. Of course I do understand that this attitude is born out of witnessing more negative manipulation that positive, and, as marketers, one aspect our job is to take measures positively influence perceptions.
One way to ensure your “tactics”, or rather approach is positive, can be measured and effectively channelled towards goals and objectives is to start with an effective, flexible and well planned out strategy.
Thanks Liz, you have helped me lay some of my “tactics” demons to rest.
Many of us in the web business are reassessing their own strategies and tactics, and you have so hit the nail. Thank you for the kick in the ass to get us all rethinking how this works, but most importantly, how we work.
Brilliant as always! Thank you!
Hi Alisdair,
Boy do I agree with your feelings about the word tactics, especially the sense that it leans toward manipulation. I’ve started using the word, implementation instead when I can.
Meanwhile, I’ve gotten serious about staying on track with which is which and testing out what works. It’s how to get where I want to end up. 🙂
Hi Lorelle,
You’ve always had an eye to the bigger audience and the strategy of keeping them on target. I’ve learned a lot from you on that point.
Thank you, ma’am. 🙂
I’ve worked with a number of Fortune 500 firms that confused tactics and strategy. Meetings about strategy always drifted quickly into tactics – ready, fire, aim.
“I make connections.” I like that. For a number of years I’ve thought of myself as a dot-connector.
Hi Bob!
I’ve worked with a number of C-Level folks who weren’t sure either. Seeing the bigger picture isn’t something we spend much time on in our educational system. We don’t teach or test it. Decision trees and decision models are hardly covered. It’s no wonder. We grow up to be leaders on a path someone else has laid out … they tells us where to head and it’s our job to get there. Most of what we do in school is tactics.
Ironically any three-year-old who doesn’t have a strategy for understanding his or her parents won’t get fed.
Liz,
I like how you think out loud. I agree, it’s critical to know your mission or where you are going. We need a filter to see opportunities and help choose. I kinda see this as a coach versus a quaterback. The coach sees the whole game, the field, the other team, etc. The quarter back is implementing the strategy. Good challenge to be a better coach.
I’d also add it really helps to open myself up to a few close advisors when filtering opportunities.
As always, thank you.
Tim
Tim,
Exactly. We get so busy doing that we don’t see what we’re building … We walk but don’t see where we’re going.
We get in the habit of listening to other folks’ directions … our parents’, our teachers’, our bosses’, then we try to be leaders, but we haven’t learned how to do dead reckoning.
Imagine Columbus and three tiny ships across the Atlantic …
I like how you describe Strategy and I am inclined to agree…Strategy, to me, is the intellectual ability applied to each step that leverages skill sets and competencies that lead to consistent “wins”. Chess is strategy.
Most companies, especially startups and small enterprises get off on the wrong foot. A “right-headed” framework starts off with specifications (what is this company doing to enrich me?). From there goals are the high level attainments to strive for ($$ Sales, %% Market penetration, $$ Low costs, Winning opportunities, etc.). Then we develop objectives, the middle (monthly) steps to attain the goals. From there the tasks become clear and easily communicated as managers and worker bees.
Since parents and many schools fail to teach us about goals, consequences and determinable outcomes how can we expect young ppl to help our companies achieve its goals. My answer…I only hire ppl who know what their goals in life are. Only by knowing how I will enrich/exploit them can they help my company achieve its ambitious goals.
Hi Gorgongo,
Wins … finding and taking the opportunities. Yep.
I got through a good part of my career on “seat of my pants” thinking. It didn’t take more.
Then someone challenged me to use the rest of my brain. I credit that person with teaching me to think.
That’s when I learned that less is more. That’s when I found out that paying attention was more important than trying to get attention. That took years to learn.
Value every lesson — and every person who I’ve found who gets them.
It sounds so simple to focus on strategy yet we often are so caught up with doing things, tasks and tactics. Completing tactics gives us a false sense of accomplishment when we should be asking are we accomplishing the right things, for the right people at the right times to reach our larger goals.
I agree that students (whether young or young at heart) are not taught critical thinking, judgment, inference, estimation and decision making skills, which are more important today than ever in the past. People need to know how to analyze and evaluate content coming from the Web. Web 2.0 has also created new ways that people are learning with networks, collaborative real-time decisions making and horizontal structures instead of command and control. Many have not yet mastered these new skills.
Still, the details and tactics seem to hold our attention instead of the big picture, mission and strategic thinking of winning opportunities. So many times, our focus on tasks instead of strategy makes us looks like ships without captains being tossed around by every wind of change.
Hi Jeff!
Tactics are so much easier to pay attention to tactics and tasks … we can see them. It’s similar to how schedule and budget get more attention than quality because they can be seen more easily.
I agree that we’re learning the skills we never got in school, because we’re finding them necessary to build the web and to survive this new economy. Yet our daily living pulls us to navigate the tasks at the same time.