The Obvious Cost of Misaligned Operations

If active strategy isn't your primary language, you might as well just burn money

Special note: I’m trying something new where I cover a lot in this free newsletter, but I’ve got deeper dive information past the “paywall” section. I also recorded an audio version of this newsletter for the paid subscribers.

I’m a free subscriber on plenty of newsletters, so don’t feel bad if you’re a free subscriber here. I’m just experimenting with ways to make the paid version much more worth it.

In a lot of organizations, it seems a lot more true that “someone” knows the strategy, and that a lot of people feel they don’t have to, haven’t been led to understand it, or that the strategy is something that sits in a slide deck for quarterly meetings. Everyone knows to do tactics, and far worse, it seems that people are incredibly good at being busy, but “busy” doesn’t equal “useful.”

The Value of an Active Strategy

I’m using the term “active strategy” to mean an active understanding of the decision points one might make before any execution whatsoever. For instance, let’s say you run the kitchen at a little seaside inn. Maybe the strategy is “something delicious for any guest within twenty minutes.”

Strategies are tools that influence decisions. Tactics are how you implement those strategies. For instance, we need to know whether that strategy has a budgetary consideration. If I keep a LOT of things in the kitchen and pantry, I can guarantee something delicious. But if I break the bank, that probably won’t be the best way to implement this. (There’s more to this to consider in the paid version.)

Without an Active Strategy, A Breathing Strategy, You Invite “Box Checking”

The opposite of running an active strategy, where decision-driven thinking powers actions, is that people resort to running their own playbooks, or doing what they envision as being important, or the worst choice of all: they do what they think is expected of their role without any connectivity to the larger goals that an active strategy promotes.

Box checking. Did you do something? Check. Did you move something from this point to that point? Check. Did you do the kind of thing a person in a kitchen should do? Like scrub the plates or cut up more celery for tomorrow’s chicken salad? Check.

A company that doesn’t promote leadership at all levels is deeply susceptible to box checking and this means people are basically trying to look busy, or at best, they’re putting in some effort, but with no through-line to what matters most for the organization at any given turn in the road. (I go into this more for the paid subscribers, too.)

Bad strategy lives in documents instead of decisions. Good strategy is a song everyone can sing.