Strategy and Tactics are not mutually exclusive things
--
[Originally published on my personal site. You can read it there — https://www.antmurphy.me/blog/2023/2/27/strategy-and-tactics-are-not-mutually-exclusive]
“adaptable CEOs spent significantly more of their time — as much as 50% — thinking about the long term.” — HBR, ‘What Sets Successful CEOs Apart’
Did you know that the top-performing CEOs in Fortune 500 companies spend significantly more time thinking strategically and long-term?
Part of this is a by-product of running larger companies successfully. As the company size grows, you need to elevate yourself out of the weeds and towards a more long-term view.
But another part is the importance of balancing short-term, tactical work with long-term strategic intent.
Although the best-performing CEOs spend more time thinking long-term, this was still balanced against other time horizons.
Very few CEOs spent more than half their time thinking long-term; the highest performing were those who still had a healthy balance between long, mid and short-term perspectives.
Most CEOs know they have to divide their attention among short-, medium-, and long-term perspectives, but the adaptable CEOs spent significantly more of their time — as much as 50% — thinking about the long term. Other executives, by contrast, devoted an average of 30% of their time to long-term thinking.
If unbalanced, you often see a high-level strategy but nothing connecting it to the day-to-day work.
Strategy is, therefore not a single horizon — it’s not what you would classify as ‘long-term’ — but rather it‘s a continuum of long, mid and short-term.
The constant debate of ‘Strategy vs Tactics’, ‘Planning vs Execution’, and ‘Vision vs Tasks’ leaves us often behaving as though they are mutually exclusive when they’re not.
The constant debate of ‘Strategy vs Tactics’, ‘Planning vs Execution’, ‘Vision vs Tasks’ leaves us often behaving as though they are mutually exclusive when…
