‘Tactical Strategy’

I came across this phrase today and it sounded great at first — then I went back and thought about it.  Does it really make sense? The interesting thing about this phrase was that it gave up something about the presenter. The presenter was more concerned about tactics than the overall strategy.

This person routinely struggles with building and adhering to an effective strategy. Instead, each new task is of the highest priority. The problem with that is that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Everybody soon puts their head down in an effort to get things done, and they never look up to see where they are headed.

If your day-to-day actions are tied to tactics and not strategy and vision, you will get things done. But, simply getting things done  does nothing to get us closer to our objectives.

Lay out a strategy, identify priorities, and plan tactics that feed into that strategy like a hot air balloon. Doing this helps transform disparate self-centered entities into a cohesive force building towards a common goal…soon there’s only one place to go.