Over the years, I’ve had many managers (and individuals) explain to me why they don’t spend more time/energy on strategy—real strategy, not a to-do list for the following quarter.

Reasons not to plan/develop strategy are endless, but here are the most common

• I don’t know what strategy should cover or how to plan it. This is the most annoying because it’s based on pure laziness. There are yards of excellent books, thousands of websites and hundreds of consultants all anxious to help you develop and plan your strategy.
• The idea [of developing strategy] scares me. This has the distinct advantage of being honest. It’s usually not the envisioning part that’s scary, but the planning required achieving it. I’ve found that planning often scares people, but it won’t if you treat it like the Times crossword and do it in pencil rather than ink. That will remind you that it isn’t carved in stone.
• What’s the big deal? What do I really need it for? The reasons to plan strategy are legion and millions of words have been written and spoken about them, but I can sum them all up with a quote from a book I read years ago. I’ve forgotten the name of the book and, after googling around for a while, I couldn’t find any reference to Savielly Tartakover, but I’ll still attribute it to him.

‘Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do.
Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”
— Savielly Tartakover, Polish Grand Master

And that pretty much says it all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Business info, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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