We often hear the terms “strategy” and “tactics” being bandied about in the business world. But how many of us truly know the difference between the two?
If you have any familiarity with chess, you may already have an inkling: In the chess world, strategy is basically long-term thinking and objectives, and tactics are the moves that (hopefully) bring you closer to those objectives. Put another way, “Strategy is deciding what you need to do; tactics are the specific steps you take to do it.”
The idea isn’t all that different in the business world.
Strategy “helps you answer the question, ‘What are we trying to accomplish?’” writes Erica Olson, author of Strategic Planning Kit for Dummies, while “tactics help you answer the question, ‘How are we going to accomplish our goal?’”
Or you can think of strategy as picking a destination and tactics as taking action to get there.
Another way of looking at it, as venture capitalist Arthur Rock put it, is that strategy is ideas, while tactics are execution and management.
“Strategy is easy,” Rock wrote in Harvard Business Review back in the 1980s, “but tactics—the day-to-day and month-to-month decisions required to manage a business—are hard.”
Anna Mar sums up the differences between strategy and tactics very neatly in five points:
- Strategy provides the overall direction, while tactics address the gaps
- Strategy is global, while tactics are local
- Strategy is long-term thinking, while tactics are shorter-term thinking
- Strategy is complex, while tactics are more simple
- And finally, strategy is mysterious, while tactics are obvious
Forbes contributor Mikal Belicove came up with the nearly-impossible-to-pronounce acronym “G’SOT”:
- “A goal is a broad primary outcome.
- A strategy is the approach you take to achieve a goal.
- An objective is a measurable step you take to achieve a strategy.
- A tactic is a tool you use in pursuing an objective associated with a strategy.”
Sometimes the words get jumbled up, writes Liz Ryan in Forbes, and that can cause confusion, “because my kids in grade school are taught ‘strategies’ for dealing with various interpersonal situations, and in the business world we would call those activities ‘tactics.’”
In the business world, too, these terms and ideas can get all scrambled — or they can get in each other’s way. A sense of urgency about trying to figure out what to do can crowd out the mental space needed to sit down and design a longer-term strategy, warns Graham Kenny in Harvard Business Review.
Of course, it’s not an either/or proposition — successful organizations need both strategy and tactics.
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat,” wrote Sun Tzu, author of the 5th century BC Chinese classic text on military strategy The Art of War.
Transparency vs. opacity in strategy
“Senior leadership is responsible for setting the strategy for the organisation in line with the values, objectives, culture and the environment. Everyone else in the organisation is doing their part in some form or other of implementing that,” writes Bhavna Dalal in Forbes India.
Some companies will tell anyone who cares to listen what their vision and big-picture goals are. Other companies, though, can be very secretive about what their longer-term strategies are.
There is nothing new about that, either. Sun Tzu also wrote, “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”
Restated in a more business-y way, “Tactics are highly visible to your competitors. Strategy is less obvious. It’s a common mistake to assume a competitor’s tactical actions represent a strategy.”
In organizations that take that approach, Ryan notes, people within the company may be aware of tactics — “they know their monthly and quarterly goals, for instance — but they don’t know the higher-level strategy from which their goals are supposedly derived.”
She sees that as “a huge problem,” because how are people supposed to get excited about the work that they do when they don’t understand how their work fits into the big-picture goals? On the other hand, she explains, “When every employee in the place understands the vision, then all their oars will be pointed in the same direction. Tactics down on the ground connect everyday activities with the strategy.”
