Strategy and Tactics: Five characteristics of successful tactics
If you look at the books and magazine articles (or business blog articles), you can tell that everyone loves strategy. I mean love it. You’d think that if you could come up with the coolest strategy in the world, you’d be sitting on Easy Street faster than you can say You Tube.
But, as the sports analogy goes, if it was all pre-ordained, there wouldn’t be a reason to play the game. But we play the game anyway just to see what happens.
That’s where tactics come into focus. Tactics are where the rubber meets the cloud. It is where the doing starts to accomplish the strategy. If the strategy of Pimp Your Work is to help you, the reader, make your work life easier, nothing much happens until us Pimps start to write about the tools, techniques, and tactics that will help you do that. Strategy, in another pimpalicious definition, is merely a “position paper with possibilities.”
What makes a tactic great?
Tactics easily tie to the strategy. If your work is writing computer code to determine the tax liability of the firm and the strategy is to create the best workplace blog site in the world, I’d suggest that you’d have a hard time figuring out how your tax liability software relates to the strategy. I don’t know about you, but I was writing tax liability software I’d not pay too much attention to the strategy in that particular situation and feel disconnected in my work as well.
The best tactic is one where you can say “if I do this, it will mean we’re ‘x’ amount closer to achieving this part of the strategy.” For example, if I write about strategy and tactics here on Pimp Your Work, that will help cover two of the ten things we want to cover to make this the best business blog on the planet for helping our readers enjoy their work experience.
Tactics are easily translated into goals based upon the strategy. If your strategy is to help readers make their work life easier, then you should be able to translate that into concrete goals. In order to make readers work lives easier, it means we should have a goal of writing about these ten subject areas all the time because they are the ten most critical areas in making work life better.
Tactics are easy to measure. We want to post “x” times a week on this blog in order to provide adequate content to our readers. Easy to count how many times we post something.
Tactics provide a feedback loop to the strategy. If we do what we’re supposed to do with our tactics in our goals and measurements, those tactics will tell us if we will be able to meet our strategy. If we’re meeting our easily measured goal of writing posts here on the blog, but we’re writing about tax liability improving your work life, we should see our traffic plummet. That’s the feedback loop to the strategy in play.
Tactics will optimize processes that enable the strategy. By doing the work and having easily measured goals, the feedback will tell you where a process is broken and not helping you meet the overall strategy. If you try and cross-sell something to a person standing right in front of you but your feedback is you don’t know what you should be selling, that tells you that you should build into your process of cross-selling a tool that will suggest what to cross-sell to the person in front of you. Or a hundred other things where a process could break down.
Tactics are critical to having a successful strategy. They also provide feedback on what is needed to make the strategy work.
Or if the strategy should be thrown out. My favorite line about strategy and tactics comes from Seth Godin: The right strategy makes any tactic work better. If it doesn’t, one should question the strategy.
Don’t be enamored with strategy. Tactics are equally important.
Tags: General work pimps, Strategy, Survival SkillsRelated Stories
POSTED IN: General work pimps, Strategy, Survival Skills
0 opinions for Strategy and Tactics: Five characteristics of successful tactics
No one has left a comment yet. You know what this means, right? You could be first!
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: