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Strategy and Tactics: The Series

by Scot Herrick on January 15th, 2007

This week, I’m going to take a look at “Strategy and Tactics,” those terms that are always invoked in business settings, but are rarely (IMHO, of course!) understood.

There are great implications to understanding the differences for those of us wanting to Pimp Your Work. We all spend effort and energy working the work. How you spend your time and what resources you use to get things done are very different if you are working strategy compared to tactics.

Strategy and tactics are typically meant for companies or departments within companies. An inordinate amount of electrons have been stored commenting on each for specific companies or for specific strategies.

But there is another area where strategy and tactics count: your career. How you use strategy and tactics for your personal work is a Pimpalicious factor in your work success.

In this series, I’ll take a look at both company and personal strategy and tactics.

First, however, let’s try out a couple of definitions so that we’re all on some common ground:

Strategy:

A strategy is a long-term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal; most often winning. Originally coined in the military and defined as “the science or art of combining and employing the means of war in planning and directing large military movements and operations,” the term has now moved over to the rest of us as a “plan…for obtaining a specific goal or result.”

Those are a bit off for our purposes. Better for business: a strategy is products, services, and operational plans by which a company will achieve profitable growth (Scot’s Pimpalicious definition).

Tactics:

Tactics, in the military sense, deals with the use and deployment of troops in actual combat.

But we’re not in combat. Better for business: tactics are the use and deployment of people, processes, and technology to implement the successful outcome of the strategy (Scot’s Pimpalicious definition).

Each are important to Pimping Your Work.

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POSTED IN: General work pimps, Strategy, Survival Skills