Winston Churchill once said, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” It’s the same thing with ideas. You can have a litany of clever ideas, but without execution, you have nothing. For example, you can create the world’s greatest widget, but if there isn’t a market or drivers for your widget, then it will die on the vine. The balancing act is to have optimization between your strategy and your tactics. As Sun Tzu said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” The key is to symbiotically and simultaneously enact both strategy and tactics as part of your greater plan.
A common mistake in enacting strategies is that they are oftentimes created in a vacuum by leaders who fail to enroll the executors of their strategies in the process. This enrollment is accomplished by facilitating open and ongoing dialogue with tacticians as part of promoting your greater strategies. This encourages tacticians to develop into downstream leaders who promote the greater vision of your company. This type of buy-in occurs when you have transparent and egoless communication at all levels within your organization.
Accuracy or exactness matters when rolling out a strategy. If you have a strategy that is loosely calculated and ineffectively communicated and expect successful adoption of your ideas, you will likely be very disappointed. I see this happen all the time. Where companies are essentially throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks, all while rolling them out as the next sure thing. I get that some people need to have a detailed road map on every idea, which is a recipe for never getting anything done. At the same time, you need to efficiently think through the viability of your strategy or idea and then deliberately execute it.
At the end of the day, your big picture strategy leaders need to be 100 percent aligned with the tacticians who are rolling out the greater strategy, and frankness and candor are key. Everyone at all levels within the organization needs to feel free to communicate successes and concerns without repercussion. If there is any sort of stifling of ideas, you will assuredly lose momentum. All parties need to feel as if they are getting what they need to carry out their part of the greater vision or strategy.
