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background: i make my living putting together quantitative analysis to support / reject strategic decisions I would not say a strategy alone achieves nothing -

background: i make my living putting together quantitative analysis to support / reject strategic decisions I would not say a strategy alone achieves nothing - its actually quite the opposite the larger your "team" and scope of activity is. A lot of business decisions are not related to having a tactic but are a trade off between two important things (like cost and quality). Having a clear strategy allows people in your company to arrive at the same decision for which side of that trade-off to favor - which increases individual autonomy. For example, a high volume strategy leads to favoring low cost. A strategy to be scalable might favor higher upfront costs since cheap non-scalable options are removed from review. In both cases, when an option doesnt fit the strategy it is not considered an option. So your decision pool is reduced. Sometimes this reduction is enough that the choice is made for you. Especially when accounting for multiple strategies and company initiatives. Tactics are a different beast. Sometimes a tactic involves going against the general strategy, but is approved because there is confident calculation behind it and the expected result is wanted. The most important thing here is the calculation. It takes time and energy to develop and communicate a tactic. Those things are limited, so you can only be working on so many tactics at once, and only so many people are qualified to be doing that work (because those job titles are expensive). The critical factor here is that the volume of decisions that need to be made across an organization on a day-to-day basis are not bound by how much time you have to develop a tactic for each of them. So you have to trust the autonomy of your company hierarchy at each level to be able to make default decisions that dont interfere with company strategy. A strategy alone is enough to help keep a loose handle on things.. it goes a long way to preventing chaos. You might end up with a cashier accepting a return on something that is obviously not a valid return, but the overall strategy of being return-friendly is maintained. You also dont end up with a fist-fight between your cashier and the customer (extreme alternative example). When you have time, you develop a tactic for validating returns with order#'s or receipts, etc. but maybe your tactic team is busy dealing with warehouse optimizations this month

kyllo 7y ago
Yes, flexibly applying situational tactics to follow the principle and spirit of the strategy rather than the letter of the rulebook, is what leaders generally want their people to do. They communicate intent and let good judgement do the rest. The way I have always thought of strategy, though, is that it should be directional. Say what input variables you think we should increase or decrease, in order to get closer to the optimum, relative to where we are currently. Taking your example of cost vs. quality. Obviously we want to find an optimum. If a manager can state which direction we need to move in and why, to make progress toward the optimum, I will take their strategy seriously. But if they just tell their people to "optimize," I dismiss them as having no strategy. A manager who's responsible for formulating and communicating a strategy, has to at least have an opinion about which side of the curve we're currently on. Early in my career I was an analyst at an ocean shipping company--lower rates meant fuller ships, higher rates meant better unit margin but lower utilization. Corporate's strategic message? "Fill up the ships with high-paying cargo." It became a joke among the employees.

kyllo 7y ago

Yes, flexibly applying situational tactics to follow the principle and spirit of the strategy rather than the letter of the rulebook, is what leaders generally want their people to do. They communicate intent and let good judgement do the rest. The way I have always thought of strategy, though, is that it should be directional. Say what input variables you think we should increase or decrease, in order to get closer to the optimum, relative to where we are currently. Taking your example of cost vs. quality. Obviously we want to find an optimum. If a manager can state which direction we need to move in and why, to make progress toward the optimum, I will take their strategy seriously. But if they just tell their people to "optimize," I dismiss them as having no strategy. A manager who's responsible for formulating and communicating a strategy, has to at least have an opinion about which side of the curve we're currently on. Early in my career I was an analyst at an ocean shipping company--lower rates meant fuller ships, higher rates meant better unit margin but lower utilization. Corporate's strategic message? "Fill up the ships with high-paying cargo." It became a joke among the employees.