How Does Strategy and Tactics Differ?

Without strategy, success can not be controlled.

Which begs the question, just what the heck is 'strategy'?

How does it compare to 'tactics'?

I'm sure you could hazard a guess… but are you confident that you could describe and define strategy well?

And moreover, are you happy with your ability to create and execute an optimal strategy – for your business project – or anything else for that matter?

I'm going to make this brief for now, but will expand later.

First, what is strategy?

Here are some of my notes on Strategy and Tactics adapted from Eli Goldratt.

First, ultimately, strategy is the purpose or function for accomplishing an objective. A sub-objective if you like.

Let's think of an example.

Our ultimate objective might be 'happiness'.

And the strategies of accomplishing happiness [might] include 'successful career', 'successful romantic relationship', 'optimum health', 'life purpose', and so on.

So, take one 'career success' for example. Career success is a strategy for accomplishing the objective of happiness.

In brief – Strategy is the answer to 'what for'

Career success. What for? For Happiness.

This is different to Tactics.

Tactics are the answer to 'How'?

That is to say, given an objective, achieving happiness, one strategy is 'achieving career success', and 'how we are going to do that' is our set of tactics to accomplish the strategy.

Looking at it from the direction of tactics. Asking 'why are we doing this'? or 'What is its purpose'? gives us an answer that identifies our Strategy (the 'what for' entity).

Corresponding Strategy with Tactics.

For any strategy (achieve career success) there needs to be sufficient corresponding tactics (get experience, get training, get references, choose career path, etc).

To help identify tactics and strategy entities…

UP: Build upwards to a higher level strategy entity by asking about the lower strategy entities 'why do I want to accomplish this objective'?

DOWN: To build downwards from a higher level strategy entity to a lower level, concentrate on the tactics of a higher strategy to ask:

'how exactly should this action be performed, what actions should be taken in order to achieve this? how do we take this action?'.

This will reveal lower level tactics, from which to assign the corresponding strategy (accomplished by asking 'what is the specific objective attained by taking this tactic action?')

See http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/holt/em534/Goldratt/Strategic-Tactic.html

Originally posted 2008-07-28 12:05:33.

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