Strategy and tactics: The key to strategy success
There are spectacular successes of strategy out there in the business world. And spectacular failures.
Usually the spectacular failure is one where the premise of the strategy was incorrect in the first place. My classic example is Classic Coke. It became Classic Coke because the company seriously misread the marketplace and the power of its own brand. Fortunately, they changed New Coke back.
Spectacular successes of strategy correctly reads what the market needs. You Tube, the iPod, Facebook and others are good technology examples of what we really wanted to have but didn’t know it.
But given a reasonable read of the market and a strategy that has some success characteristics, there is one common denominator that will trump everything else: execution. Or, if that term is too harsh, implementation.
Strategies succeed or fail based upon how well tactics are executed.
Take an “outside looking in” view of the iPod. All of the basic technology was already in place. The strategy was to take all of this existing technology, put it into a box, provide a secure site for the music companies to place their music that people could buy. Piece of cake, right?
How about this:
- Building a simplified control for the box that doesn’t require labels, just icons.
- Building a disk drive small enough and durable enough to last
- Building a battery small enough with enough storage to run the box for hours
- Building a small enough screen that is still sharp (or later that could play video).
- Build a box small enough to fit into a pocket but can store 10,000 songs.
- Build a web site that effortlessly integrates with the box.
- Persuade the music companies your site is secure.
- Persuade the music companies that the pricing of their songs should be less than a dollar.
- Build the site to take on additional formats — like podcasts and video.
And in all deference to the people who work for Apple, I’m sure this isn’t even the thousandth of the big issues nor even the really hard stuff that was done.
Execution. Work the tactics, measure the work, get the feedback, modify the strategy as needed from the feedback, and keep working the tactics.
In my small bulleted list, how many failure points were there that could have prevented the iPod from fulfilling the strategy?
Yes, Apple had a good strategy. They didn’t have flawless execution. But their execution of the tactics combined with the strategy for the iPod enabled a raging success.
Pimp Tip: Execution will always trump strategy.
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