Every Entrepreneur, Project Manager, Leader and Small- to Medium-Sized Business CEO (or other C-Suite dignitary) must understand the difference between tactics and strategies, and learn the way to think about each. Just as importantly, each of us needs to integrate them to achieve real results and to avoid walking a needlessly random path governed by the sway of outside forces. Welcome to Entrepreneurial Business Planning - Tactics Versus Strategies - Optimizing The Blend.
Here's a preliminary explanation of the difference, and an example:
A strategic plan might cover a span of time from several months to an entire lifetime, but its destination is where you ultimately and passionately want to be.
Tactics are short-term initiatives (spontaneous adaptations) for dealing with the impediments, complications and situations which you encounter along the path to achieving your goals and objectives. They often involve palliative measures, adjustments in timing, a slight detour from the map -- but they are merely immediate accommodations, and should never keep your ultimate focus from your goals and objectives.
The simplest analogy is in a situation where you are planning to go to a supermarket, and your ordinary route is blocked off by Police Crime Scene Investigators, a fallen tree, a picket line of anti-government protestors, an oily chemical spill, or an inoperative traffic light; while you will navigate a new route (the tactic), you will still be heading for the supermarket (the strategy to appease your hungry children who are suffering from serious Taco-Bell Gastritis/ Single Dad Syndrome).
Don't ever lose sight of strategy when engaged in a tactical maneuver. Keep your internal compass set on your destination. Occasional rests and positive visualization can be very helpful in getting you safely to your rendezvous without having you fall prey to careless mistakes, or endless, labyrinthine detours.
Blending these two tools is very much like going back and forth, looking into a telescope (strategy, the big picture, a macrocosm), and then looking into a microscope (the incremental steps needed to get there). You must switch back and forth between pragmatic detail and your vision.
Terrible, Gratuitous Metaphor:
If you are climbing a mountain, you must focus on your objective (the peak), while you constantly look down and along side you to avoid tripping on roots or being hit by branches in your path.
This constant refocusing is a necessary leadership skill. It enables you to always know your destination (and how you intend to get there in terms of your mapped path), but to change the incremental steps, as may be necessary to navigate around quicksand, crocodiles, and bandits who may be in the middle of the road.
If you are well-practiced at this, you become a powerfully adept problem-solver -- you will take many a detour, but you'll always wind up back on the main road to your stated objective, and to the successful achievement of your mission. You'll understand, viscerally, that goal attainment requires the ability to shift in and out of perspectives.
Business is inherently the solution of problems. Business is, by its nature, an obstacle course, with a prize at the end. Problems are not aberrations -- they are absolutely to be expected, remedied or circumvented, and then, if you have solved or side-stepped each and every one of them, if you've managed to maintain your most important sense of direction, you'll find yourself at the mountaintop.
Douglas E Castle
Chairman
TNNWC Group, LLC - Management Consultants to Emerging Enterprises
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NOTICE: This article is Copyright © 2011 by author Douglas E Castle with all rights reserved. It may be republished without permission provided that it is published in full, with all hyperlinks and exhibits left intact, and with full attribution given the author. This article does not contain or constitute medical, health, psychological, legal, regulatory, investment, securities, financial, tax, or any other form of professional advice -- the reader acknowledges and accepts this disclaimer. Further, the reader indemnifies and holds harmless both the author and all publications in which this article appears of any damages, claims, loss, responsibility or liability emerging from the reader’s utilization of any information contained herein.
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