Save: In Defense of Strategy - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
Source: In Defense of Strategy - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
If you use the uncertainty window to execute blindly for a while before crafting a strategy, you’ve both wasted precious uncertainty time and made decisions — hired people, signed customers, taken on outside capital — that will make it harder to change direction when you decide you must.
Great overview of the ways in which strategy is often de-emphasized in the tech industry, as well as some concrete advice on how to build it effectively. As a side-note: it’s an ongoing struggle to clearly delineate the difference between strategy and tactics, and so much of what leaders consider to be strategy is really just tactics. See “Theorycrafting Early B2B Marketing Strategy” for my own attempt to distinguish the two:
“Strategy also sits at a higher level of abstraction than tactics. It’s not about how many webinars you’ll run in a year or your keyword mix on paid channels; it’s about what those webinar programs are designed to do for the business and how that keyword mix fits into your investment in paid channels. Or, to bring it back to the original military context, deciding to invade North Africa before Normandy during World War 2 was strategy; a balancing act between politics, culture, and military considerations. The details around how that invasion was executed were tactical, based on what specific mix of forces and efforts seemed most effective.”