What Counts as "Strategic"?

Weird focus on ‘pivots’ as being the vehicle through which strategy happens.

The contrast between saying ‘opening another Macdonalds isn’t strategic; investing in Chipotle is’ is emphasizing big bangs as the way strategy is executed, rather than steady execution.

A valid strategy for macdonalds could be ‘ubiquitousness’. Then every new franchise opening is an execution step in support of that strategy. And in that sense opening a new branch is strategic.

Buying a stake in Chipotle is strategic if it’s in support of a business goal around managing the competitive landscape, diversifying branding, accessing new markets, etc.

But if it’s just a place to park some excess capital based on expected returns, and the choice of chipotle was arbitrary (could just as well have put the money in Nike or Microsoft), it could be entirely tactical.

> It's even tricky to define "strategic,"

A strategy is a framework for making decisions to accomplish a goal. Strategic decisions are the highest level decisions made to enable that framework.

> A useful framing is that strategic moves are still about optimizing profitability, but they're also a way to give future management more tools for doing so at a later date.

No they aren’t. Optimizing profitability doesn’t need to feature in goals.

Chess paints a clear picture of the strategy/tactics distinction to me.

Tactics is concrete. Carry out these steps, and some goal is achieved. It’s the action that actually moves something forward. I can prove that I can checkmate my opponent in 3 moves or less by following these steps. I threaten two pieces simultaneously, and you can only defend one.

Strategy is a proxy, a general objective that aims to put one into a position where tactical steps can be carried out. If there’s no immediate tactical steps to carry out, then I try to “control more space” or “make my pieces more mobile” or “protect my king” or whatever. An accumulation of these nebulous strategic advantages tend to, eventually, lead to a state where I can forcibly carry out a series of steps that gain an objective advantage. But sometimes obtaining a strategic advantage doesn’t pan out. I gain the “initiative” and my opponent is on his heels struggling to defend, but in the end he’s able to defend, and I have nothing to show for it.

In practice, tactics are less certain, but still highly probable. If we send a package via courier, a high percentage of the time it will arrive at its destination. But once in rare while the courier has an accident and our package doesn’t arrive.

Tactics and strategy are also relative to skill level. I can’t carry out a checkmate in 40 moves. I’m left to try to achieve a strategic advantage, like “keep my opponent’s king boxed in”, until sometime later I can hopefully see that forced checkmate in 3 moves. But a computer can detect the forced checkmate in 40 moves, and also carry out the correct steps to completion.

The computer can execute on that skillset better than I can, and so a situation that requires strategy for me is tactical to the computer.

My rule of thumb for what's meant by these terms in business has always been:

Strategy - how do we get what we want in the long term?

Tactics - how do we get what we want in the short term?

If your tactics conflict with your strategy then there needs to be a reason. E.g. staying solvent for long enough to make it to unicorn status :D

Anything can be strategic if you want it to sound more important.

I do like Iaan Banks' take on the strategy/tactics divide in his Culture novels, in which the shipminds believe that a distinction between the two is confused.

In my years I’ve almost exclusively heard something described as “strategic” when the speaker meant “I want to do this but it will lose money in the short-term”. I took to mentally substituting “unprofitable” because many of the promised payoffs from “strategic” actions never arrived and it was a way to tell a story and get what you want without it making clear and predictable financial sense.

Julie Zhuo's post "How to be Strategic"^1 is illuminating; highly recommended.

1. https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/how-to-be-s...

P.S. Sorry to have to resort to sharing a medium.com link, the only one I could find.

> It's even tricky to define "strategic"

No, it's not. I have it in The Big Bucks : "Strategic" means you don't make any money.

Not original with me. It came from 3Com, where the Microsoft LAN Manager deal was always described as "strategic."

I've always though about the strategy/tactics divide as a continuum between larger scale (global/long-term) vs smaller scale (local/short-term) concerns. I might be off in this, but that's the interpretation I have developed, fwiw.

The difference between strategy and merely plans is strategy needs an enemy.

It's a plan on how to achieve something that someone else is also trying to achieve.

Most people misuse strategy when they just mean a plan.

was taught that strategy is something you do to yourself that causes something else to relate or respond differently. tactical is when you operate on something directly instead of yourself.

a strategic move for a company can be things like retooling with new talent in anticipation of being attractive to a new market of customers. a strategic move for a person can be spending the winter lifting weights to get fit for summer. going to school is strategic, working at a job is tactical. developing relationships with suppliers is strategic, assuming JIT delivery is tactical. rebranding and presenting yourself as an AI company is strategic, building infrastructure is tactical.

a tactic without a strategy is just a reaction, and a strategy without a tactic is just posturing. they say that "culture eats strategy for breakfast," which imo also implies that without strategy, culture starves.

metaphorically, strategy is what you do upstream of engagement. if you are in a canoe or kayak, the orientation of your path through a rapid is strategic (or the choice to portage), the strokes you use to avoid rocks and falls are tactical.

not all strategy is bullshit and it may be working on things you can't see, but in tech we get a lot of tactics without a strategy, where we're solving pointless optimization problems hoping that some strategic factor will come along and make them valuable. it's a useful idea with a lot of guff around it.

Is there an element of risk associated with a given strategy?

As an old Army guy I can help with this.

Strategic is big picture and long term planning as opposed to tactical which is focused on execution and near term goals. From the Army perspective generally brigade elements and higher are strategic while everything below the brigade level is tactical.

For example let's say I need to truck some supplies out to soldiers. Clearly you will need one or more trucks (a convoy), personnel, and things to put into those trucks. At that level everything is tactical. There is still a LOT of planning that must happen because you must account for security, coordinating communications, driving routes, local peoples, fuel, and so on. This is all tactical. If the convoy is large enough it could comprise the entirety of a transportation company with oversight and coordination from its parent, the battalion. A great many people are involved and there is a tremendous amount of funding to successfully pull this off, but its still just tactical.

Now, let's think big picture. Let's say I wanted to advance my Army into a new hostile location and keep all the soldiers well supplied. This requires much more than a battalion and does not happen quickly. There required planning effort may have taken a year and there are more outside parties to coordinate with. You also need to enable new infrastructure both on the ground, communication, and administrative. That takes very high levels of authorization to ensure the soldiers on the ground have the support they need and that resources remain available from the highest levels of military planning. This is all strategic. Its not greater or more brilliant than tactical planning, but there are more pieces involved and it takes much longer to accomplish.

In the corporate world let's say you want to start doing business in Japan when your company has never done business in Asia before. This is strategic. Finding the real estate and setting up the WAN network are all tactical. Its more specialized.

Another way to think about it is distance between execution and the risk analysis in planning. The more immediately identifiable a risk becomes the more tactical it becomes. That does not mean the given risk is less risky or more easily solved just because its more tactical than strategic. Often strategic planning is not necessarily about solving for any risk but instead identifying potential risks might be sufficient.

strategic - adjective

done as part of a plan that is meant to achieve a particular purpose or to gain an advantage

strategy - noun

a plan that is intended to achieve a particular purpose

How many fewer blog posts and / or twitter threads would be needed if people just used a dictionary to look up a word? There is no content in this article that is relevant as the author appears to have come up with an off label meaning for words.