Strategy Versus Tactics: When Fast Execution Still Leads Nowhere
Most organisations think they understand strategy versus tactics. They don't. This confusion explains why brilliant execution fails, why talented
Most organisations think they understand strategy versus tactics. They don’t. This confusion explains why brilliant execution fails, why talented teams go nowhere, and why “being more strategic” usually means moving faster in the wrong direction.
What strategy actually is
Strategy isn’t a plan. Corporate strategic planning implies that if you follow the steps, success follows. That’s comforting. It’s also wrong. Plans are outputs of strategy, not strategy itself.
Strategy isn’t a fancy word for tactics either. It’s not about quick wins or what to do today. Speed in the wrong direction is just expensive failure. Western Union had this problem. They could have bought the patents and owned telephony. Instead, they chose to make better telegrams. Better telegrams is a tactic. It’s a good tactic if you believe the past is permanent. Owning the phone network would have been strategy.
The difference between strategy versus tactics comes down to this: strategy is deciding who you want to become. Tactics are the actions that get you there. Most companies skip the first part entirely.
The system you’re swimming in
Here’s what makes strategy versus tactics so difficult. You’re not sitting in traffic. You are traffic. Systems surround everything. The wedding industry, the college admissions complex, the way your company runs meetings because that’s how Microsoft Outlook defaults them to 30 minutes.
Systems hide behind culture to look normal. They make terrible decisions feel inevitable. A 100,000 wedding happens because of 1,000 small yes decisions, each one seeming reasonable at the time. By the time you realise the system has you, you’ve already spent the money.
You have two choices with systems. Work within them and accept what they give you, or change them. What doesn’t work is working within a system whilst expecting different results. Most strategy failures happen here. Teams execute brilliantly inside systems designed to produce the wrong outcomes.
The false proxy trap
Strategy versus tactics gets muddied further by measuring the wrong things. False proxies are easy to measure but useless. Asking programmers how fast they type tells you nothing about their coding ability. Tracking email open rates whilst ignoring response rates means you’ll spam everyone and destroy your list.
The challenge for leaders is picking metrics that actually matter, then building them into how people think. Put the number on a whiteboard in the lobby. Mention it every time you pass someone in the hall. Not because you’re being annoying, but because what gets measured shapes behaviour. If you measure short-term numbers, people will optimise for short-term numbers. If you measure the response rate alongside volume, culture shifts toward quality.
This is how you change systems from the inside. Not through inspiring speeches, but by changing what everyone talks about daily.
What real strategy looks like
Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee. Their strategy recognises that middle-class knowledge workers wake up pre-caffeinated and want a small luxury that solves that problem whilst elevating their status. Everything they do serves that. When they drift from it, they struggle.
Microsoft’s strategy, stolen directly from IBM, is simple: nobody gets fired for buying our software. Not the fastest. Not the cheapest. Just the safest corporate choice. That strategy hasn’t changed in 50 years. The tactics change constantly. The strategy holds.
Google’s homepage had two links when Yahoo had 183. That wasn’t a design choice. That was strategy. Yahoo said come here and stay. Google said come here and leave. One choice, made relentlessly over a decade, created hundreds of billions in market value.
The hard part nobody mentions
Understanding strategy versus tactics means accepting that good strategy takes time whilst everyone around you demands immediate results. The solution isn’t better time management. It’s negotiating space to think long-term whilst delivering short-term wins.
Bring the market into the room. Interview customers on video. Show executives real people describing real problems. Two-minute clips beat 40-slide decks every time. Emotions shift decisions faster than spreadsheets. If you can demonstrate that your strategic choices are changing how people feel about you, the metrics take care of themselves.
The real work isn’t choosing between strategy versus tactics. It’s having the guts to pursue strategy when everyone else is day-trading their attention.
