Good Tactics Eat Strategy For Breakfast
You may need strategic planning — but you do not need a strategy
A few years ago, I was working with a startup founder who had served in the Marines.
I was excited about the opportunity to work with him: it is rare to learn from someone who has a perspective on leadership that has been, quite literally, battled-tested.
For those who don’t know my style, I learn through debate, disagreement, and post-mortems (and my wife’s patience as I go through these 3 stages).
The entire time we were working together we kept debating the importance of strategy.
We kept disagreeing on three questions:
Where does Strategy (with a capital S) fit in the decision-making process?
I said: at the start
He said: at the end
When we change course, do we acknowledge it as a change in strategic direction or do we help the company process it as a continued evolution of the mission?
I said: acknowledge the change
He said: reinforce the continuity
How important is it to rely on (or avoid) precedents when we make decisions?
I said: be consistent
He said: acknowledge nuance
Looking back it is crystal clear to me now why his answers to these questions were right, and the “MBA” answers were wrong.
These are the three counterintuitive truths I’ve learned by scaling startups for the last 10 years.
1/ You can delegate strategy, but you can’t delegate execution
Joining a startup is an exercise in cognitive dissonance (more on this here).
You know that most startups fail. Even at later stages, only a third will raise a subsequent round. Yet you believe what you’re building will beat the odds.
You compromise your vision, often in ways that aren’t immediately obvious, every day: whether it’s signing a large customer that’s outside of your target market or hiring an employee you know you’ll need to layer in 12 months.
The thing that keeps startups going through all this is passion. Passion is what brings them back on course when they are forced to take a detour from the vision.
Passion is contagious. And it emanates from the founders.
For it to be visible founders must be involved in execution.
If, as a founder, you delegate strategy:
You may need a bit of extra time and outside help to get the story retroactively buttoned up when it comes to the next fundraise.
You will need more VPs/Directors to coordinate team activities and priorities in real-time because there isn’t a strong framework to keep them aligned top-down.
➡️ These are problems you can throw money at (incidentally, these are common consulting engagements for me.)
But if, as a founder, you delegate execution:
Very quickly you’ll find that team activities don’t ladder up to the vision anymore.
Accountability starts to break down with teams focusing on achieving their goals instead of shared goals.
Last but not least, you risk losing touch with the one thing that helps you recharge your passion and clarify your vision: customers.
➡️ These are problems you cannot throw money at.
2/ If you have a clear vision and milestones along the way, you want the strategy to change
The common hierarchy of decision-making is vision — strategy — execution.
The CEO sets the vision and raises money behind it.
The C-Suite develops the strategy, with the CFO helping set guardrails and prioritize resource constraints.
VPs execute against that strategy.
Now, consider this alternative hierarchy:
Vision — Milestones — Resourcing — Strategy.
The vision is unchanged.
Milestones are set based on their ability to give you a tactical advantage and bring you closer to the vision. They can be customer case studies, finance KPIs, organizational capabilities, or product launches.
Resourcing is still the job of the CFO. But the decision is no longer abstract e.g. “Does my resourcing support the breadth of my vision? Can I afford to pursue a two/three-pronged strategy? ”
💡 Instead, it is concrete and measurable: “Do I have enough resources to hit this milestone? What are the relevant benchmarks? Which milestones have the highest upside with the least resources required?”
Last but not least, Strategy and the associated decision authority get pushed out to middle management, or, even better, ICs.
In doing that, the job of strategy is clarified: incrementally bring the vision to reality by finding the best way to use the resources available to maximize the chances of accomplishing the milestone assigned to each team.
As a result:
💡 Middle managers learn to act as mini-CEOs: reconciling resources and goals (milestones) within their domain in real time.
💡 There’s more room for experimentation and innovation that’s sitting precisely where it can have the most impact: with the people on the front lines who are closest to your customers.
3/ The job of a good strategic plan is to surface the right tactics
The core problem with frameworks, plans, and pretty much anything you can put on a PowerPoint slide is that you lose nuance.
But nuance is where startup success happens:
Early adopter customers switch away from incumbents because your solution addresses their nuanced needs better.
Investors buy into your vision of the market because you’re picking up on an emerging trend that isn’t obvious to everyone else.
Star product managers or account executives understand the nuance of a customer’s pain points and use cases long before you have the scale to run A/B tests, hire a UX researcher, or slice/dice your product analytics.
So a good strategic planning process needs to:
Surface this kind of nuance from the front lines to the executive team
Equip the teams that best understand it to support the milestones
When running a planning process I like to include a leadership offsite that’s specifically designed not to make decisions.
Instead, it should help teams educate each other on the opportunities they see and plan to pursue from their vantage point and, in the process, surface the connection points or tensions between team-level lists of tactics.
In other words, the output of a strategic plan is not a strategic framework or set of strategic priorities.
Instead, it should be a list of tactics that have been vetted for consistency across go-to-market, operations, product, and finance.
To convert your vision into reality — and find the tactics that will help you get there, dig into two further resources 👇
1/ HBR article on the importance of strategic plans vs. planning
🔗 Link
2/ Abacus & Pencil strategic planning playbook
🔗 Link
➡️ When you’re ready to go into 2025 with a high-impact growth plan, surface the right tactics, and align the team to key milestones — get in touch and I’ll help you map out the path to get there (Video Call | LinkedIn | Email)