The Ultimate Threesome
Did I get your attention?
In our get-it-done-right-now world, it’s easy to spend your time being ineffective—that is, doing something that won’t produce results or grow your business. Drowning in a monsoon of to-do lists and activities, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s meaningful and important.
To help keep perspective on the bigger picture, make sure you don’t confuse what we call “The Big Three”: Objectives, Strategies and Tactics.
1) Objectives lay out your target—your ultimate goal—the end picture. Wal-Mart’s primary objective is to offer the lowest prices, always.
2) Strategies establish your basic guidelines and provide a framework for thinking toward the end goal. Wal-Mart uses massive volume and amazingly efficient distribution systems to guarantee shoppers everyday low prices.
3) Tactics are the various methods you utilize to achieve your objectives. Promotions, campaigns, product placements and displays are all tools used in the development and deployment of tactics.
Most executives focus too much on tactics and not enough time on defining objectives and strategies. They don’t clearly define and differentiate between objectives, strategies and tactics.
If you focus exclusively on tactics, you might too easily abandon the objective just because your tactic didn’t produce results. When a coach loses a game, he doesn’t change the objective of winning the next game. He simply changes his approach after learning what he can from his prior loss.
Tactics often fail. You have to spend endless hours testing and retesting, refining and thinking about your tactics. But only after you clearly define your objectives and overall strategy.
(The original article BJ Bueno and I wrote about objectives, strategies and tactics for Idea magazine can be found here.)
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