Strategic versus Tactical

I work with a bunch of volunteers to help small businesses advance to their next level of success. We also coach start up businesses, help them with articles of incorporation, choosing their organizational structure (sole proprietorship, partnership, C corporation, S corporation, Limited Liability Corporation, etc.). We help them map out strategies for a successful launch of their new business.

Chatting among the volunteer mentors it is easy to discern which careers each has retired from. Some are powerful executives finally free to serve their own interests. These guys are usually picky about choosing the mentee’s next step; he is used to power decisions and directing the efforts of others. Then there are the accountants and tax strategists, the bean counters and classifiers.  Others are sales execs who would glad-hand your arm off is you let them!

Some of these comments are terrible stereotypes, but they still echo reality!

More interesting is to observe retired women executives. By far they are easy to meet and talk with. They are responsive to feelings and communications. Easily supportive of others they make good coaches and mentors. They seem to quickly subdue their ego and get down to business of the client mentee. Not very surprising is it? Women make excellent teachers and coaches. Their ideas and thinking processes are tops, too. I've found it vastly more pleasing working with women over the years than men. The latter are usually too tied to ego.

We have many good mentors, thought. The best are those who do suppress their egos and focus on the needs of the client.

In a recent chat I shared the fact that I had made a career in strategic planning. Many of my peers in the volunteer group, however, worried about too many people planning tactics and not strategies. Thinking back over my many paying clients of the last 25 years, I sensed some parallels. But such was their behavior before they engaged in true strategic planning.

I think the difference – what makes a planning effort strategic rather than tactical – is the discipline forcing the decision-making group to envision themselves as an organization 15 to 20 years into the future. Dreaming what that would be like helps us picture what needs to be happening then and what sort of operating platform we will need to support those happenings. Getting outside the boundaries of our current thinking is difficult. Moving outside of the box means removing ourselves from today. Focus on function, on mission. What is it we really are about and mean to devote our time, attention and resources to?  Then make that happen in a time far removed from today.

Making that break allows the envisioned future to draw us forward toward it.

Think about that sentence – ‘draw us forward toward it’ – and let it pull you out of today.

Remember when President Kennedy challenged the nation to place a man on the moon by the end of the decade (by 1969)? A lot of people thought he was nuts, talking through his hats. He was not. He clearly established a goal that was seemingly impossible to attain. But he reminded everyone that we had the building blocks to make it happen: we knew where we were at the time (Earth), we had capabilities to reach into space (missiles and rockets), and we had burgeoning technology to guide us; we now have a goal of where we want to get to. The trick was to invent the ways and means of getting there.

And that’s exactly what happened. It took a lot of science, math and engineering, but it also took commitment, organization and financial resources. Research soared. New careers were built out of thin air. Whole new industries popped up. And the result?

We did invent our way to the moon in 1969 – right on schedule – July 20, 1969.

Becoming strategic requires moving our frame of reference out of our norm. Strategic thinking requires us to invent new ways of doing things, new goals, new times and eras. Making that break gets us out of the ‘box’. We are then free to think unfettered to the present. We are able to create and invent come what may.

Once we have a good grounding in the future vision, we can move backwards and figure out how to get from the present to that desired future. The how is tactical. The where and when and nature are strategic.

Envision the future of your firm or organization or pet project. Envision your life as you would like it to become. Then choose to make it happen. The rest is to be invented by you or your team.

Think how this might change your life.

October 17, 2014