It’s another great weekend and today we would like to quickly consider the aspect of strategy for an entrepreneur. It’s a bit unfortunate though that the words strategy and tactic are oftentimes mixed, interchanged, used haphazardly and yet they mean different things. I hope you are not one of those that confuse these words; are you? Just for clarification purpose, we can say that a business strategy is an articulation of the overall direction of an enterprise in the medium and long-term. It is a specification of the way your enterprise competes in your industry whether it’s entertainment, education, hardware, clothing industries etc. This implies that your strategy should define the rules and guidelines by which the mission, objectives etc. of your enterprise will be achieved. It is simply an organized way of achieving something in the long-term.
Now, what about tactics? Tactics are your short-term enterprise plans and they can be said to be sub-sets of your strategy. Tactics are actions that you will take to support the strategy or general direction of your business. This general direction might be market share leadership, brand leadership, cost leadership, high volume, product differentiation etc. Your business tactics are therefore the means by which you will achieve your strategy, and these means are generally short-term and may be planned or ad hoc in nature. Tactics use specific resources to achieve short-term goals with clear deliverables or outputs. Tactics are generally flexible and skillful management of resources to achieve set goals, which in turn support the long-term strategy of your business. Then, what are the top or principle issues an entrepreneur must know about business strategy? Please read on.
I guess it’s time to stop and run now. I do hope we have shared something good on strategy today. Do you want your enterprise to be different? Do you like setting the pace while others follow? Think about strategy, and the issues I have mentioned above. Decide what you want to do with your strategy, and get going.
Till then,
The Wise Entrepreneur