A Tactician's Guide to Strategy

A Tactician’s Guide to Strategy By Jon Orozco, MBA, SHRM-SCP. Author’s note: This guide breaks into four phases. The fundamentals come first. Then my approach. What is strategy? Fancy MBA terms will walk you through positioning and activity selection. To me, strategy is three words: How to Win. That is the whole game. Define what winning means, whether that is making buckets of money or saving the world. Six elements make a strategy work: An honest assessment of your market. Intentionally picking a corner to compete in. Mastery of your craft. Fighting to keep rivals out. Selecting what you will NOT do. Team and resources in sync. Whatever your endgame, careful planning, the right tools, and a willingness to adjust the roadmap is the only way to win. Why? The game changes. The landscape evolves. Your competitors think and recalibrate, too. But there is more. Like the secret recipe of Coca-Cola or the sauce on the Big Mac, every product fit for market has a distinct element. Strategy only works when tacticians align leaders and managers with the right competencies, psychometrics, and emotional intelligence. My approach deviates from the pack. To blaze a trail, your managers must evolve into influential, emotionally intelligent leaders, and your leaders must coach with compassion. Being kinder than necessary lets your team recalibrate and refocus while building the plane already in the air. Weather and destination keep changing. All of this becomes what I call a Strategic Intention. It demands your full attention. Phase One: The Role of a Strategist and Understanding Competitive Forces Professor Michael Porter, one of the original thought leaders of strategy, wrote “How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy.” He laid out what the strategist does and how she copes with competition. Porter names five competitive forces: the threat of new entrants, the power of suppliers, the power of buyers, the risk of substitutes, and rivalry among existing competitors. New entrants come into your corner to take share. Powerful suppliers charge premium prices, limit quantities, and push vendors to fund product development. Powerful buyers demand lower prices and higher quality, forcing competitors to court them. Substitutes pull your target customers into adjacent industries. And rivalry drags everyone into price wars that gut revenue and profit while the other forces keep grinding. Phase Two: Fundamentals of a Classic Strategy Porter returned in “What Is Strategy” to expand the playbook around the company’s approach. He covered creating a plan to win by assessing and selecting a market, defining success through goals, allocating resources, and knowing what defeat looks like. Before you can be a formidable foe, you must master organizational effectiveness. Why? How can you move pieces on a chessboard when they are not aligned and have no defined role? Organizational effectiveness (OE) means being substantially better at the essential functions of your craft than your direct competitors. OE is efficiency. It is mastering your utility, reducing waste, and producing more widgets and services faster and better than before. Maximum value at the lowest cost. To get there, eliminate unnecessary mistakes, deploy technology, and automate everything you can. If you need vocabulary, the MBA terms are change management and continuous learning. They all point at the same goal: leaner, better. OE only takes you so far. Rivals see your success, wise up, and counterpunch. Once you have mastered the essentials, move to strategic positioning. Strategic positioning is where you intentionally perform essential functions differently. Rivals can mimic only at the surface. Real change requires retooling, retraining, and reworking the business model. Almost impossible when two companies specialize in two very different positions. If Kia wanted to enter the Lamborghini market, it would have to rethink luxury versus run-of-the-mill cars from the ground up. Three segments live inside positioning. The first is variety-based. Focus on a specific product or service. Think Jamba Juice or Salt & Straw. Jamba runs blenders, juicers, mixes, and nothing else. Salt & Straw makes fresh ice cream with funky seasonal flavors. The second is needs-based. Lock in on a specific customer group that needs a diverse set of items at the right price. Think Walmart with everything cheap. Or Chase Private Client, which serves a high-asset minimum and then handles every banking need. The third is access-based. Focus on geography or customer scale. JetBlue picks smaller airports like Long Beach to offer better service and lower costs by streamlining operations. Why pick a position intentionally? To keep rivals out by making it complicated and expensive to follow you. Real trade-offs lock in. A specialized fresh-and-organic burger joint or an electric car company forces competitors to think twice. Joining your world makes them incongruent with their own brand, forces capital investment to retool, and forces them to reorganize teams around it. The master plan is when OE matches strategic positioning perfectly. Smart competitors will see it, bow out, and find another market. Once you own your corner, two warnings: be consistent and intentional. Drift and you enter a tailspin that confuses customers, divides your team, and wastes resources. If The Dollar Store launched high-end designer bags, customers would cringe and the team would be baffled. As TLC said, don’t go chasing waterfalls. Phase Three: Specifying Your Strategy Type With the classic model handled, the next three approaches narrow the focus. Professors Reeves, Love, and Tillmanns argue in “Your Strategy Needs a Strategy” that four advanced paths exist: classic, adaptive, shaping, and visionary. Their thesis hinges on two elements: predictability and malleability. Predictability is about forecasting the future. Malleability is the odds that you (and your competitors) can shape the industry. Adaptive strategy keeps the essentials of classic but the plan runs for a shorter period and evolves fast. Recalibrate. Watch the battlefield. Change tactics as competitors encroach. Divest assets that became liabilities. Reallocate. In adaptive mode, tacticians are nimble and less efficient than a well-oiled machine. That is fine. They move deliberately to hit a goal or outmaneuver a rival. Expect a device that runs 80% as efficient as the bestseller at a third of the price, because perfect enough frees cash for elsewhere. Like the weatherman reads shifting winds, the strategist becomes the ship’s captain reading customer tastes and market shifts, correcting course in real time. Shaping is adaptive with the volume turned up. Little is established. Planning periods are short. Strategy changes again before the ink dries. Shaping requires the strategist to move fast and build hubs of commerce that attract the masses. The risk is high because the ecosystem does not exist yet and you have to build it. The reward matches the risk. When the iPod hit in late 2001, it was not the first music player. Sony’s Walkman launched the portable music category back in 1979. Apple brought it into the 21st century by putting hundreds, then thousands, of songs on a single device versus a CD with maybe 20. Then iTunes let consumers buy albums, individual songs, audiobooks, and digital recordings to sync. Visionary is brand new. Like the all-screen iPhone in 2007. Nothing else in its category. It disrupted several industries at once. This category needs careful planning because customers need guidance on who, what, and where they are engaging. Phase Four: Executing and Adapting the Strategy Phase four is execution and adaptation. This is arguably the most critical part because this is where the rubber meets the road. A great strategy is only as good as its execution. You need a clear plan to implement it. As a leader (no matter the company size), you must vocalize and convey the strategy with clarity. You must be in sync with the rest of leadership. Line management needs direction. They need answers and focus to win. The best approach for a 21st-century workforce is an organic two-way conversation that includes uncomfortable talks. The strategy is only as strong as the leaders rallying behind it. Inclusion. Intent. Strategy spoken with clarity is storytelling at its finest. It communicates the planning, the upward climb, the tools and resources, and the urgency. Why? You are painting a blank canvas with broad strokes and asking for help shading the rest. Most importantly, you need people to push back when they disagree so you can recalibrate. Lean into the story and three things crystallize: strategic intent, mission, and commitment. Execution means all stakeholders aligned and committed. It means employees trained and equipped with the skills and resources to deliver. It means a strong communication and feedback system so everyone moves toward the same goals. And it means staying ready to adapt. As markets and competition evolve, the strategy must adjust. Monitor constantly. Analyze constantly. Spot emerging trends and threats early. Phase Five: Improving Strategy with Information and Transparency Information asymmetry and transparency shape sustainable competitive advantage. They affect the landscape by creating gaps some players exploit while making it harder for others to compete on level ground. This phase matters most in the digital age, where access to information and the ability to analyze it can swing the advantage hard. Asymmetry means one party has more information than another. A supplier might know market trends or competitor moves that the buyer does not. Transparency is the opposite. Information is open and accessible. It changes the game. Suppliers with better knowledge negotiate higher prices and better terms. Buyers with more information demand lower prices or stronger terms. Asymmetry blocks new competitors from entering. Transparency makes it easier for them to understand and compete. Instead of masking your strategy from competitors, take a different path. Focus on your clients. Use information asymmetry and transparency to attract more of them by giving them more information and more transparency. You build trust. You establish credibility. Both are essential to attracting and retaining clients. Share precise details about products, services, and operations. Demonstrate expertise and a commitment to client satisfaction. Transparency makes clients more confident and more likely to return. Use data analysis to understand preferences and trends, then tailor offerings to meet your target market’s specific needs. Phase Five: Execute to Win Strategy is the cornerstone of any successful business. It is about winning. Winning means a plan, a position, and activities maximized for your niche. To build it, assess your market, pick a corner intentionally, master the craft, fight to keep rivals out, decide what you will not do, and align team and resources. But strategy only works when tacticians align leaders and managers with the right competencies, psychometrics, and emotional intelligence. Porter’s work on competitive forces covers the fundamentals of classic strategy: a plan to win, market assessment, defining success, allocating resources, and fending off competitors. OE is essential. It means being substantially better at the core functions than your direct competitors. Once you have OE, move to strategic positioning. Perform the essentials differently. The key to winning is careful planning, the right resources and tools, and adjusting the roadmap as the game changes, the landscape evolves, and competitors recalibrate. Being a trailblazer means making your own path. To do that, your managers must evolve into influential, emotionally intelligent leaders, and your leaders must coach with compassion. Only then can your team recalibrate and refocus while building the plane already in the air, with the weather and destination always in mind. Porter’s competitive forces, OE, and strategic positioning are the elements of a winning strategy. Becoming a strategic tactician demands your full attention.