âYou keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.â
Inigo Montoya
The biggest issue I see with the misuse of the word isnât that its popular. Itâs that its changed our behavior.
My goal here isnât simply to rally against corporate buzzwords. What I hope to accomplish is to get leaders to think about strategy for what its supposed to be.
Rather than simply redefining the word, weâve begun to accept our strategic visions as being siloed and boiled down to a series of repeatable steps. In many cases weâve let our personal ambitions determine our business actions. Itâs, even unintentionally, created walls. The term strategy has lead us believe that within our individual containers we can be self sufficient. As leaders weâve allowed groups to be isolated, and the result is that strategy has lost its goal of being a lasting, overarching and vital alignment of our purpose, our goals and our tactics.
Itâs also allowed us to assume a purely top down view of our world, as if from an imaginary high perch. Rather than embracing the tactics that make strategies successful, its become a tool that demeans the tactics that make strategies a achievable reality, rather than a concept or theory.
Your Strategy Isnât Strategy At All
Iâm going to pick on content strategy as an example, but feel free to replace âcontentâ with any vertical part of your operational organization.
Most content strategies are clearly a âframeworkâ of actions through stages designed to create a fairly specific outcome. That outcome is to move people into and through a funnel. While adding âstrategyâ makes this sound very important, and content strategy is important, the challenge is that it isnât really a strategy.
Each step of the framework, which you are likely referring to as tactics, are a set of specific actions. They are intended to be accurately executed, creating a press release, for example. So the framework is actually tactics, not strategy, and the actions are surgical.
If you try to look up the militaryâs âtank strategyâ of how they use tanks in warfare you wonât find much information. You see, it isnât really strategy to single out one piece of your operational organization and call it strategy. In almost every definition youâd really wind up only with âtacticsâ. There is a lot of information about âtank tacticsâ.
Defining Strategy In Business Terms
One of the reasons strategy is used so wrong is that despite many attempts to make it a functional item, itâs really a goal based on purpose. Most great strategies are born out of purpose + goals + trends. But strategy needs tactical plans attached in order to be achievable. Otherwise, itâs just ideas.
If we go back again to military examples, since it is the source of these concepts, letâs list a few examples of military strategies:
- Air Supremacy â degree of air superiority where a side holds complete control
- Shock and Awe â military doctrine using overwhelming power to try and achieve rapid dominance over the enemy
- Theatre Strategy â Concepts and courses of action directed toward securing the objectives of national and multinational policies
- Persisting â A strategy that seeks to destroy the means by which the enemy sustains itself
They provide some great examples and take aways to think about with your next strategy:
- They all support a vision or purpose.
- They donât relate to any specific branch, unit type, or even âplaceâ
- They almost never talk about themselves or are not organization centric
- They are not, in themselves, the goal. They donât say âwin 50% of the marketâ. Those are strategic objectives.
- They do relate to total outcomes
- They are refined but exist as concepts for many years, rather than specific annual goals or short term trends
We quickly see what is wrong with most strategies. While each of these strategies need tactics, goals to be measurable and timeframes of execution, the strategies themselves are not defined in that way. Notice the terminology the military uses to describe their strategy- concepts, doctrines, degrees.
Also, great strategies donât exist in silos. In many companies, corporate politics create vertical walls between their departments. âStrategiesâ within these walls are barriers to developing actual strategies and take away the focus on total outcomes. It becomes about making my function important, not about the goals of the overall business and winning in the market.
Some better ideas of business strategies your leadership team should be discussing:
- Surprise and Delight
- Client/Customer Acquisition
- Market Penetration
However, I often hear these thrown around as if they are just nice terms for a singular action. These types of strategies, when well aligned to our business objectives, purpose and reinforced with execution, tactics are actually what we should be focused on.
Also if you organization does not define these but says you execute them, Iâd question how. These are not just concepts from a book, they must be properly applied to your specific organization to be successful.
Lets look at the definitions:
Definition
These terms have their origins from the military. So Iâm going to site many examples and references to how they are used in military terms. Iâm not a military buff, but the original source is a great way to reset the conversation.
Tactical â relating to or constituting actions carefully planned to gain a specific end.
Strategic â relating to the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them
One immediate problem with these two phrases is that there are only two of them. It leads conversation to point where one is seen as âsmallâ and the as âbigâ. That isnât enough for anything but polarization.
Tactics are a plan or framework. What most businesses are calling âstrategiesâ are frameworks designed to reach a specific result, which makes them tactics, not strategies.
Strategy should apply to long term or overall aims. If you change your âmarketing strategyâ every year (and you should), you donât have a strategy at all. In fact, most of what you do annually isnât strategic at all. Also, if it comes with a step by step guide or chart it probably isnât a strategy.
Whatâs Missing â Surgical
Not being one to present a problem without a solution, here is what is missing. Strategic and Tactic have their foundation in military terminology. After all when it comes to planning and hierarchy nobody has done it longer or is more copied than the military. What got lost is that there is a third commonly used term to donate the scale and precision of execution: surgical.
Surgical â denoting something done with great precision, especially a swift and highly accurate action
Resetting Our Scale
What this does is provide a new scale. Now tactical does not need to mean specifics. In fact, by nature of itâs definition the only thing specific about tactics is the goal. This also allows tactics to return to itâs actual meaning â frameworks and plans. Finally, strategy can reassert itself as purely as a long term goals.
Our new conversation scale should be:
| Term | Use |
| Surgical | Specific action(s) to be executed |
| Tactical | Plans or framework with a specific goal |
| Strategic | Any mutli-year or business environment foundation |
Wrap Up
One of most over used buzzwords in business or leadership of the last few years has to be the word strategy. It has become a catchall for ânot the detailsâ. I sadly fear itâs because there is a vanity to being âstrategicâ. Also, many people associate strategic with valuable. This adds extra emphasis to being strategic or being seen as strategic.
What Iâd love to see as a trend for the 2020s is strategy to return to being strategic.