On strategy. [INSIGHT]

By Gonzalo López Martí@LopezMartiMiami

• In the business world -particularly in marketing & advertising- few words are thrown around more profusely and absentmindedly than “strategy”.
• A few years back I started an impromptu poll: during business meetings and presentations I’d casually ask clients and/or colleagues to please define “strategy” for me.
• Just for the sake of being on the same page semantically.
• Some people would fumble.
• Others would give me a harsh look, as if I’d asked them a thorny personal question.
• Try it and you’ll see.
• Nobody really knows what strategy means.
• Or let’s put it this way: it means something different to everyone you ask.
• In the marketing scene a lot of folks think a strategy is a sound bite, a slogan, a motto.
• Or even a word.
• As in “our strategy is live healthy”.
• Or “our strategy is health”.
• Some people believe strategy is the take-away they want consumers to obtain from an ad campaign.
• Or the consumer behavioral insight that underscores a creative execution of some kind.
• In their minds, the creative brief is the strategy and the creative execution is the tactic.
• I beg to differ.
• Problem is, when I hear the word strategy I think of holing up in a room to shoot the breeze, draw doodles on a notepad and write bromides on some big post-it hanging on a wall.
• More on that later.
• So what do we talk about when we talk about strategy?
• Not to be confused with stratagem.
• Strategy is not office politics and mutual back rubbing.
• Strategy is not water cooler hearsay.
• Strategy is not rounds of golf, drinks and depleting your expense account.
• Team-building activities such as office Secret Santa have little to do with strategy.
• It ain’t strategy simply because it’s on PowerPoint.
• Strategy is not stealing other people’s ideas and taking credit for them.
• A strategy is, plainly and literally speaking, a plan.
• It’s as simple as that.
• Hence, “strategic planning” might be the dumbest pleonasm the corporate world ever coined.
• Pleonasm: a redundant turn of phrase, as in wet water or round ball.
• Of course, strategy is a multifaceted concept.
• Strategy is also a toolbox and an owner’s manual.
• A set of skills and habits, a pattern of behavior, a cultural mindset, a worldview.
• Not to be confused with mere tunnel vision, compulsion, obsession, neurosis.
• Contrary to many a middle manager’s credo, strategy has a reactive component to it.
• It ain’t dogma, it should not cast on stone, it must be flexible.
• It’s playing with the cards you’re dealt.
• It involves foreseeing the consequences of one’s own and other people’s behaviors.
• It’s throwing spaghetti to the wall and seeing what sticks.
• Strategy needs validation by research and by trial and error.
• In real life.
• With a caveat: if it changes every year, it might not be a true strategy.
• Much less if it changes every season.
• Strategy is taking the long view and doing your homework.
• An antonym of procrastination.
• If you are an athlete, for instance, training early and hard to be in great shape is sound strategy.
• Being in bad shape and just listening to Survivor’s “The eye of the tiger” five minutes before a game is not.
• Strategy is not a silver bullet, a stroke of genius, a rabbit in the hat, a Hail Mary pass.
• Strategy is addressing the important as well as the urgent.
• Strategy is not superstition or wishful thinking.
• Strategy requires an all-encompassing vantage point of view to appreciate the big picture.
• Strategy is acknowledging the unknown.
• See, many folks out there love the rarefied atmosphere of strategy because it removes them from the harsh everyday reality of decision-making.
• Their lofty “strategic” musings have no correlation whatsoever with the eventualities on the ground.
• Unfortunately, more often than not, strategy is just an excuse for inaction, to sink one’s head in the sand.
• Strategy is not an abstraction conceived in a vacuum.
• Strategy is not muddying the water to make it look deep.
• Being “strategic” can be a great way to cover your rear end.
• The top brass deals in strategies. Tactics are for interns.
• I even heard a guy say once, using it as a put down, a sugarcoated insult: “he’s just a tactician”.
• Many a strategist out there is just a naysayer in disguise, or so methinks.
• Strategy, unfortunately, has also turned into a bit of a cliché.
• As in “strategic”, which is just a pompous synonym of “important” or “big”.
• Yes, I must admit I don’t particularly like the little word.
• There are so many other ways to say the same thing.
• Plan.
• Blueprint.
• Method.
• Policy, if you want to sound governmental.
• Game plan, should you want to borrow a term from the sports world.
• Forest, if you are an environmentalist (as is seeing the forest and the tree).
• Roadmap.
• Big picture.
• Entire libraries have been written about strategy and strategizing.
• No wonder it’s become quite commonplace.
• ‘Strategos’ is Greek for general, as in army commander.
• ‘The art of war’ by Sun Tzu is the first known book about military strategy, even though the actual word is never used in its text.
• The first author who used it in the West was probably the German military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz.
• Broadly speaking, strategy was supposed to be everything a general does when not engaged in battle.
• The good old “pick your battles” is not a bad, if extremely condensed, definition.
• Properly choosing the terrain, the time of engagement and the resources -human and otherwise-.
• Tactic, on the other hand, would be the maneuvering on the battlefield.
• Centuries later, around the 70s and 80s, it became an academic fad to borrow military terms and apply them to the business world.
• Michael Porter, Al Ries and the like.
• Business gurus, snake oil salesmen and assorted charlatans of the lecture circuit.
• You gotta give it to them though.
• Selling that kind of hot air and making the New York Times best seller list is no mean feat.
• #envy
• Militarism & strategism also have serious traction in the political world.
• Political marketers slash consultants -the former being my preferred description, the latter being the term they like to use themselves- looove military analogies.
• War room, ground war, air war and so on and so forth.
• Having myself partaken a few times, I concede that the heat of the battle on the campaign trail certainly lends itself to some martial metaphors.
• “Mission creep” is my favorite (google it).
• But, hey, whether you are trying to get folks to choose a senator or a shampoo, remember that you are not supposed to invade or kill people in this racket.
• Quite the opposite, we warm up to people, we make them happy.
• We sell love, not war.
• To close my deposition, let me tell you something: in modern-day warfare vernacular, a “strategic weapon” is a ballistic nuke with the ability to reach and wreak massive havoc in another continent (a “tactical weapon” is a short range, less powerful one).
• That’s the kind of language you’d use if you worked at the Pentagon.
• I’m no bleeding heart peacenik but, hey, we don’t work at the Pentagon.
• We are purveyors of toothpaste.
• It kind of irks me that we are using these Armageddon euphemisms in the marketing racket.
• I rest my case.