“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat.”

Strategy is the overarching plan or set of goals. Tactics are the specific actions or steps you undertake to accomplish your strategy.
A personal strategy might be to get into a particular career, whereas your tactics might include choosing your educational path, seeking out a helpful mentor, or distinguishing yourself from the competition.
Without a strategy, you run the risk of ambling through life, confused about your progress. Without tactics, you become dependent on pure luck to implement your strategy.

Strategy And Tactics Are Complementary

“Without a strategy, facing up to any problem or striving for any objective would be considered negligent. Certainly, no military campaign, company investment, or government initiative is likely to receive backing unless there is a strategy to evaluate…. There is a call for strategy every time the path to a given destination is not straightforward.”

About Geoffrey P. Chamberlain offers his perspective on the components of strategy, useful when the strategy is more about a personal goal. He identifies seven parts:
<ul>
<li>A strategy is used within a particular domain.</li>
<li>A strategy has a single, well-defined focus.</li>
<li>A strategy lays out a path to be followed.</li>
<li>A strategy is made up of parts (tactics).</li>
<li>Each of a strategy’s parts pushes towards the defined focus.</li>
<li>A strategy recognizes its sphere of influence.</li>
<li>A strategy is either intentionally formed or emerges naturally.</li>
</ul>

The Components of Strategy

Even the most elegant, well-planned strategy is useless if we do not take thoughtful steps to achieve it. While the overall goal remains stable, the steps we take to achieve it must be flexible enough to adjust to the short-term realities of our situation.
Tactics often center around the efficient use of available resources, whether money, people, time, ammunition, or materials. Tactics also tend to be shorter-term and more specific than strategies.

About Tactics

If you don’t have a strategy, you are part of someone else’s strategy.”

Strategy and tactics are two terms that get thrown around a lot, often used interchangeably. But what exactly do they mean, what is the difference, and why is it important? In this article, we look at the contrast between strategy and tactics, and the most effective ways to use each, whether you're trying to win a war, start a business, or reach any other important objective.

Stashed ideas

Strategy vs. Tactics: Why the Difference Matters - Farnam Street

Ever since Google was born in 1998, the company has become one of the most valuable and successful companies in the tech world. But despite having a net worth of hundreds of billions and 15 years of history, the company still maintains a startup mentality. How does Google achieve that? By focusing on so-called smart-creatives. Smart-creatives are employees who possess a curious, ambitious personality and combine it with their tech know-how.

How Google Works

The technological advancement over the past few decades has brought a highly competitive market. Consumers became increasingly more demanding, as they could easily compare prices and quality (reviews) of products. So companies had to adjust and produce better products to stand out.The second effect of the tech explosion is that companies could develop products very quickly and cost-effectively. Digital products scale incredibly well, which is why a tiny group of engineers can produce a product used by millions of people. It is also easy to outsource work.

The Two Effects Of The Tech Explosion

Successful companies need to rely on employees who can give them a competitive edge. These employees are called smart-creatives by Google. Smart-creatives combine ideas from different areas. They combine business and tech expertise in a creative way. They are competitive, curious and very ambitious. They are so passionate about their work that they will have no problem pulling all-nighters. The hiring approach then is to bring in those types of engineers and give them as much freedom as possible. Letting their intrinsic motivation free flow. Smart-creatives are the essence of Google.

Smart Creatives

Hiring should be a top priority. So instead of relying on just a single opinion of a manager, as it is the case in most companies, you should create a committee to represent the company’s different viewpoints.Resumes aren’t the best way to find the most interesting and intelligent employees. Finding them requires imagination, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt asks himself before making any hiring decision: If he were stuck at an airport with the prospective employee, would they be able to hold an interesting conversation?

Hiring Smart Creatives

To attract smart and creative people, you have to create a company culture which attracts those types of employees. The culture should encourage interaction (as smart people love to talk to other smart people), freedom (smart-creatives don’t like to be in a rigid environment). Employees should be able to speak their mind and have freedom to make their own decisions. A good starting point to define the company culture is to create the guidelines and principles that attract smart-creatives.

Building A Creative, Free-Thinking Company-Culture

Enforcing innovation rarely works because external motivators are harmful to intrinsic motivation as described in Drive. How can a company then encourage innovation? You create the conditions for innovation to flourish. So how can we create the right conditions for innovation? One simple rule is trying to shoot for bigger goals by “10xing” everything. For example, striving for a product which is 10 times better and has only 1/10 the cost of its current alternative.

Creating The Climate For Innovation

Google dedicates 10 percent of its budget to experiments. Employees have 20 percent free time to spend on whatever they like.Thanks to these measures innovation keeps moving. Gmail for example was a result of an employee’s 20-percent time.

Embrace Risk

We learned from the book Where Good Ideas Come From that they come from collaborating environments. Innovative companies foster this type of rich environment by creating collaborative working environments and company-wide meetings.Google has an Intranet system accessible to all employees called Moma, which stores every single product in development so that every employee knows what everyone else is working on(like Notion). This makes it easier for employees to collaborate and share knowledge, even across different departments.

Creating An Open Space To Facilitate Collaboration

The restless and ambitious nature of smart creatives will naturally lead them to create something of their own sooner or later or at least make a change and try something new, like going to another company. So how can you retain them? The answer is, by giving them what they most crave, intellectual challenges. If you challenge a smart creative’s intellect, they will feel stimulated and more motivated, keeping them happy and away from the thoughts of leaving the company.

Retaining Good Employees

How to assure long-term success? Most CEOs would think that their company needs a business plan. But a rigid business plan in fact isn’t going to work well in most situations. A fixed plan doesn’t leave room for fine-tuning. And in the technology business, things change all the time. A company needs to be able to react quickly to adapt to new situations.

Leaving Some Room For Change

In a traditional company, management used to be hierarchical (vertical). That means that decisions are to be made from superiors and that they are not debated openly, employees have to shut up and follow orders from their superiors. In smart, creative cultures, decision making is more horizontal and are debated openly. Management cannot just make up their minds about something expecting everyone to follow the orders. If employees don’t support the decision, they won’t follow it.

Discussions, Not Decisions

Chairman Eric Schmidt and executive advisor Jonathan Rosenberg pull back the curtain to reveal how the company created its unique culture of workplace innovation

Seasoned Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg provide an insider's guide to Google, from its business history and disruptive corporate strategy to developing a new managment philosophy and creating a corporate culture where innovation and creativity thrive. Seasoned Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg provide an insider's guide to Google, from its business history and disruptive corporate strategy to developing a new managment philosophy and creating a corporate culture where innovation and creativity thrive. Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google over a decade ago as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary-and frequently contrarian-principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business. Today, Google is a global icon that regularly pushes the boundaries of innovation in a variety of fields. How Google Works is an entertaining, page-turning primer containing lessons that Eric and Jonathan learned as they helped build the company. The authors explain how technology has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers, and that the only way to succeed in this ever-changing landscape is to create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom Eric and Jonathan dub "smart creatives." Covering topics including corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption, the authors illustrate management maxims ("Consensus requires dissension," "Exile knaves but fight for divas," "Think 10X, not 10%") with numerous insider anecdotes from Google's history, many of which are shared here for the first time. In an era when everything is speeding up, the best way for businesses to succeed is to attract smart-creative people and give them an environment where they can thrive at scale. How Google Works explains how to do just that.

Every organization faces a unique set of challenges and contexts. There are strategic moments in an organization’s journey that have a disproportionate impact on outcomes. 
Getting them right creates a multiplier effect on other activities as people learn new ways of working and increase their advocacy for the program of work.

A Fresh Imperative To Act

If you want your culture’s defining traits to be inclusivity, empowerment, and collaboration, the strategy process must reflect this desire. Opening up strategy development to participation, away from the typical top-down, closed approach, is a crucial act. 
It might involve running “dream sessions” in which employees envision the future of the company or contests designed to encourage participation and co-creation from customers, suppliers, and partners.

Strategy Development

If you want to encourage more curiosity as a cultural trait, negotiations should involve sufficient time spent understanding the interests of the parties involved and exploring a range of options for mutual gain.

Negotiations with Third Parties

The messages imparted to recruits in the selection and onboarding process should reflect the strategic priorities (as communicated to the candidates), while the interviewers (and others involved) should demonstrate the desired traits and behaviors.

Recruitment Of Key Talent

There are important moments with employees—if they are new to the organization, underperforming, ambitious, or looking for a change in roles—in which it’s vital to discuss and clarify strategic priorities and expectations for performance and behavior.

Critical Conversations With Employees

In crisis situations, be honest about the scale of the problems, transparent about how long it will likely take to recover, clear about the actions you want people to take, and positive about opportunities ahead in line with the strategy. 
People remember the words and sentiments of leaders in times of crises far more than in other moments.

Crisis Performance

A launch is one of the most high-profile actions in the eyes of customers, let alone employees. 
It should exemplify the strategic direction of the business and showcase the culture the organization is looking to evolve.

Launch Of New Services, Products, Or Experiences

Creating the structures that incentivize performance in line with the strategy requires careful design, consultation, and implementation. 
Short-term, individualistic performance measures will rarely enable a strategy founded on collaboration.

Performance Review

Managing to focus on each of the imprintable moments individually should not be that difficult.
Focusing on all of them consistently and coherently is much harder, yet it is critical if you want to embed new organizational norms and behaviors that support the strategic intent.

Mastering The Connection Between Strategy And Culture

There are four actions that leaders need to take to help navigate that journey successfully: 
<ul>
<li>Start in the Right place by understanding the current link between your company’s strategy and culture.</li>
<li>Create a common language for your strategy and culture teams to use.</li>
<li>Explore the potential of the culture by learning about mindsets, skill sets and practices.</li>
<li>Understanding the expectations of the strategy and communicating in a way that everyone understands.</li>
</ul>

The Four Actions

Business leaders often are tempted to focus on strategy over culture. But the strongest companies take four key actions that deliver the best of both.

Mastering the connection between strategy and culture

Red Teaming is a revolutionary new way to make critical and contrarian thinking part of the planning process of any organization, allowing companies to stress-test their strategies, flush out hidden threats and missed opportunities and avoid being sandbagged by competitors.
Red teaming challenges your plans and the assumption upon which they are based. It forces you to think differently about your business and consider alternative points of view.

Red Teaming: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

<ul><li>Red teaming makes critical and contrarian thinking part of your company’s planning process and gives you a set of tools and techniques that can be used to stress-test your strategy. </li><li>Red teaming helps you better understand your customers and your competitors. </li><li>Red teaming helps you scan the business environment for both threats and opportunities. </li><li>Red teaming shows you the dangers that lie ahead—and how to turn them to your advantage. </li><li>Red teaming may make your organization a bit uncomfortable, but it will also help you stay relevant, keep ahead of your competition.</li></ul>

Red Teaming: The Concept

Good leaders know that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with conflict. Dealing with conflict lies at the heart of managing any business. As a result, confrontation—facing issues about which there is disagreement—can be avoided only at the manager’s peril. The issue can be put off, it can be allowed to fester for a long time, it can be smoothed over or swept under some rug. But it is not going to disappear. Conflicts must be resolved if the organization is to go forward. Constructive confrontation accelerates problem-solving.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: Conflict Is Good

In a business setting, a red team will be most effective when it reports directly to the CEO and enjoys his or her full support. In practice, that will not always be possible. Red teams can still be effective when they report to the head of a department or division, as long as their scope is limited to those areas. If the red team tries to tackle problems outside of those areas, it is bound to find itself in conflict with other senior executives.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: Having Top Cover

Even when red team members conduct themselves blamelessly, it can still be a challenge to get the entire organization to embrace red teaming and take the red team’s recommendations to heart. In the military, resistance to red teaming has come largely from officers who do not fully understand what red teaming is or why it is necessary. Once they are briefed on red teaming, that resistance usually dissipates. Successful units also tend to resist red teaming. They think that because they have been successful in the past, they know what it takes to be successful in the future.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: It Works If Leadership Lets It Work

It is counterproductive for a red team to analyze every decision an organization makes. Constant red teaming can be stressful and demoralizing for employees who have their every move questioned and challenged. That is not the point of red teaming, nor is it an effective use of red teams.A red team should be used strategically and selectively. It should be brought in to analyze important decisions, major deals, and overarching strategies. It should be called on when problems cannot be satisfactorily solved through regular means.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: Red Teaming To Death

A Red team cannot become a routine and should always challenge itself. It should always encourage its members to voice different perspectives and conflicting views. Mixing up the way the team uses those tools and techniques is also a good idea. If you approach every problem the same way, you run the risk of making red teaming a bureaucratic exercise rather than the game-changing tool it should be. In addition, using the same methods over and over again can yield red teaming reports that read remarkably similar to one another, making them easier to ignore.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: Red Team Your Red Team

A Red Team that is always wrong will never be taken seriously. Its warnings will be ignored. Its reports will go unread. Its members will lose their credibility. For that reason, red teams do need to pay attention to their track record and make sure that they hit the ball out of the park, at least occasionally.If the Red Team misunderstands the problem it was asked to solve, recommends actions that have already proven unsuccessful, or suggests alternatives that are ethically, legally, or financially impossible, it will lose its credibility.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: You Can’t Be Always Right, But Don’t Be Always Wrong

Many companies like simple solutions that do not require too much effort to implement. They prefer short-term fixes that offer immediate results, even if they do little to address the underlying problem. They are less interested in long-term solutions that require a coordinated effort to implement and that often take time to move the needle in a big way. The Red team is not to be given up, as the easy way out usually leads back in.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: Don’t Give Up

Red teaming is all about rigorous questioning and thinking unconventionally. Red teams consist of people who’ve proven to be contrarian thinkers. These are the three phases of a typical red teaming exercise:<ul><li>Using analytical tools to question the arguments and assumptions that too often go unquestioned.</li><li>Using imaginative techniques to figure out what could go wrong – and what could go right – with the plan, in order to expose hidden threats and missed opportunities.</li><li>Applying contrarian thinking to challenge the plan and force the organisation to consider alternative perspectives.</li></ul>

Implementing The Red Team

<ul><li>Restating a problem and re-examining the same.</li><li>Encouraging writing the problem and the solution(s).</li><li>Dissecting an argument, which involves asking a number of questions of any argument that is used to justify a particular course of action, or that is offered as an explanation for a problem.</li><li>Checking key assumptions and re-examining the obvious.</li></ul>

The Techniques Of Red Teaming

Military strategy for the corporate world

"The revolutionary program that is transforming the military"--Jacket.

Red Teaming

A good example of task saturation is when a pilot has so much going on that he struggles to process everything the environment throws at him.(The pilots attention is on various buttons and switches that he doesn't notice another plane is coming that direction)You’re probably not a fighter pilot, but there’s a good chance that you, too, have experienced task saturation in daily life. Remember: task saturation happens when there’s a lot going on and too little time to address it all.

Task Saturation

If you wait a few days before an important business trip to make a booking, sorting out flights and accommodation would become a category one activity - high-stress, high-priority. But if you plan ahead, you subject your body to less stress, and leads to increased productivity.This is the “Do what matters most” matrix which has 4 categories. One are activities that are both high-stress and high-priority, another are activities that are low-stress and high-priority. The two remaining are activities that matter the least – stuff that’s urgent and not important, or not urgent, important.

Establish a low-stress approach to life’s highest priorities

Now ask yourself: How much time do I spend in each of the categories? According to the authors, only a quarter of your daily activities should be high-stress, high-priority. Seventy percent of your time should fall under category two: high priority, but low stress. What about the other, unimportant areas? Well, ideally, you should only spend 5 to 15 percent of your time in them. But in reality, we all gravitate towards these categories. It doesn’t have to be that way.

How much time do I spend in each of the categories? 

To become our best version, imagine the new you. Only then can you decide how to achieve it all. 1st-reflect questions like: Twenty years from now, what are some things you want to have accomplished? What would you like to improve about your life or your community? What qualities do you admire most in others?  Now think about the different roles you have. We can be parent, employee,.. and we can also be self-focused trying to keep our bodies healthy.Write 5-7 roles. Under each one, jot your specific vision for it. Use the present tense to make the mental reality more vivid.

Forming a vision for each of your roles in life.

t's time to create a plan for turning each vision for each roles into a reality. Experts recommend setting goals from now-the end of the year.Write your roles in a row just as you did when forming your vision. But this time, set annual goals for each role.A useful way to test if your goals are effective is to use the SMART acronym. It describes goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.Let’s say one of your personal goals is to become physically fitter. Translating this to a smart goal, you could write: Achieve a resting heart rate of 66 BPM by August 31st.

Set annual goals that are measurable and achievable.

If you develop the habit of planning each week in advance, you’ll be well set to transform your personal vision into reality. Maybe you already have a daily lists that remind you what needs to be done. But pre-week planning is next level. Each week, it will force you to reflect on your priorities and schedule what matters most. Block off 20-45 mins each week for this. Most people choose to do their pre-week planning at the end of the previous week. Whatever you do, don’t leave it until Monday.It doesn't matter whether you use a notepad or a laptop; it's the process of planning that counts.

The pre-weekly planning tool.

So it’s the end of the week and you’re sitting down to plan. First, take a min to review your personal vision and goals. Now ask yourself what you can do in the coming week to move towards your goals. Sometimes the answer will be nothing. Eg: you may want to organize a networking event by October 1st. If it’s February, then, perhaps you can’t do anything to achieve that goal yet. But if it’s April, you could create a list of invites or send an RSVP email.What matters is to schedule everything you want to do for a specific time, date. This way, you’ll turn vague ideas into clear action items.

How to plan

You already know goals should be measurable and time-bound. But pre-weekly planning should also be specific. Each activity needs to have a time and a date. If one of your goal is to mentor more juniors by the end of the month, you could schedule in your diary: On Tuesday at 2pm offer mentorship to Sue. Scheduling alone can increase your productivity by 50-80%It takes commitment and consistency to make goal-setting and pre-week planning 2nd nature. But you’ll find out following your vision and scheduling clear priorities will make you productive. Your life will become a lot less stressful too!

Schedule a specific time for each action item on your pre-week planning list.

Learning how to prioritize the tasks that matter most can boost productivity and performance. To get familiar, develop a personal vision and set annual goals for each role you play in life. Finally, boost chances of success by scheduling weekly activities that can help you achieve your goals. Actionable advice:Review your priorities every morning. To boost your productivity: develop a morning routine. Before waking up, review the action items you have scheduled for the day and identify the top two or three priorities. Starting the day right will make you more motivated and better focused.

Conclusion

Me running deadlines till 1am had me thinking for a while to realize i should manage my time much more wisely. By guiding me in detailed, 'Do What Matters' made my skills and ways of thinking thrive with it efficient ways of managing time.

strategy

SUN TZU

Strategy vs. Tactics: Why the Difference Matters - Farnam Street

How Google Works

How Google Works

A Fresh Imperative To Act

Mastering the connection between strategy and culture