Misconceptions on tactical vs strategic thinking
When I was starting my MBA (Masters of Business Administration) coursework, I fell in love with economics. As a recent chemical engineering graduate, I was all about the mathematical modeling. After all, I had calculated countless distillation towers, solved hundreds of problems related to chemical plant design. I was (and still am) a fan of formal modeling.
While taking my MBA courses, game theory and microeconomics in general drew me quite strongly and thus I chose a concentration in Strategic Management. For me to fall in love with business strategy and corporate strategy, it helped that I had two of the best professors at then Faculty of Commerce, now Sauder School of Business: Dr. Thomas W. Ross (I was his research assistant for years) and Dr. Helen Michelson (who was my professor for both Business Strategy and Corporate Strategy).
Since I’ve gotten more involved with the social media community, I’ve seen the term “strategist” thrown around rather casually. This worries me a bit, since just about everyone seems to think that they’re doing strategy. I figured I’d come back to my MBA roots for a quick overview of the misconceptions of tactical vs. strategic thinking.
First of all, strategy has two particular dimensions. The first one is temporal - to think strategically you need to be thinking ahead. If you are creating strategy, you have to be able to delineate the causal pathways of your strategic decisions at different points in time. Tactical decisions relate to the ‘here, now, within this week/month’. Strategic thinking is primarily far-reaching, long-range. If you create strategy, you need to be able to model the system in such a way that, whatever tactical plans you implement, you will be able to maintain some degree of predictability.
Along the same line, you should be able to choose amongst a variety of strategic objectives and adapt to changes in the (external) business environment. If you want to achieve a certain degree of growth, you need to have at least 2-3 different pathways to reach the same goal, in case something goes wrong. That’s why strategic thinking requires long-range planning.
The second dimension is organizational. If you work at the tactical level, you will be implementing strategic objectives with specific, ground-level plans, within specific units of the organization. If you work at the strategic level, you should be able to design development trajectories for the entire organization.
The misconceptions I find with regards to strategic thinking vs tactical implementation not only have to do with the organizational scale at which activity takes place, but also with the temporal dimension AND the predictive nature of strategy. If you want to be a strategist, you need to be a good chess player – think 2, 3, 5, 10 moves ahead.
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- The VRIO framework as an internal strategic analysis tool
You’ll be extra awesome if you can convince the social media types to call themselves ‘Social Media Tacticians’
Great post. I’ve been in the PR consulting business for 18 years. The number of people whe can’t properly articulate an objective vs a strategy vs a tactic on both he agency and client side is shocking.
My shorthand for explaining has been: Strategies are the blueprints. Tactics are the tools you are going to use. It’s not perfect, but it gets the point across.
So, according to your post, I should be calling myself an ‘Inbound Marketing Tactician with an eye on the long-range strategy’? It just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? *sigh* I take your points though, and they are well-received.
Excellent post. I pretty much said the same thing to the President of the first consulting company I worked for after MBA school. Except then he hated me for ever more. Because I was right.
Well said. I like to remind myself with adage, lost the battle, but won the war. The battle was a the tactic that was a path to the end goal, the war.
Several folks I’ve worked with like to talk about their social media strategy, when really they are tools/tactics to meet the larger goal.
Ah well.
Raul, this is a very well written and insightful post. When I first started in marketing at Swiss Water Decaf, my boss (and mentor) really emphasized the difference between strategy and tactics. If you don’t mind me sharing, here is a link to a strategic planning template I created a few months ago that depicts the important elements of a strategic plan – vision, mission, objectives, strategies and tactics. http://www.slideshare.net/ebuchegger/strategic-plan-template
You’ve raised some good points, practical, in fact (tactical vs. strategic). I would like to also encourage students and practitioners of strategic analysis to consider also the wisdom and practicality of evaluating the tools they’re using in conducting “strategic analysis” (taxonomy of tools). Dr. Andy