The Strategic Tactician

It seems like we end up having this conversation pretty frequently - like every time we debate the potential fit of a new candidate, or when we are assigning positions on the crew of a sailboat racing team. Who is the strategist and who is the tactician?...my question becomes - "Can you truly succeed in one of these roles without being equally successful in another?"

While we all come across individuals who have either by nature, or by design limited themselves to operating in either a "strategic" or "tactical "realm, I have observed that truly successful leaders have usually demonstrated expertise in both areas - I'm really not sure how you can do it any other way.

Going back to my military days - every operating plan was devised based on an overall strategic mission. The top planners, intimately familiar with this mission, would select and assemble the appropriate bundle of tactical moves that, pieced together, would accomplish the strategy. As an officer of the line, it was our job to execute those tactical components to perfection. But as the saying goes - No plan can withstand the test of actual battle. As the execution unfolded, the front line leaders were invariably faced with unexpected circumstances not anticipated by the plan developers. In order to make the right tactical decisions to adjust on the spot, we needed to be intimately familiar with the overall strategy, therefore enabling us to make decisions that not only accomplished our tactical objectives, but also progressed us towards the strategic objectives. Leaders can never de-couple the two.

Conversely, the only way to become a true strategic leader is to have battle-tested knowledge and experience of the tactical environment. Strategic planning has little chance of success if the leaders do not fully understand the capabilities, limitations and dynamics of the "tactical" part of the organization.

Admittedly, there are plenty of people out there who gravitate towards one or the other. I prefer a good mix of both - what's your preference?

The "Helmet with Shoes" - Dr. K

After weeks of anticipation, and enduring 421 pages of dehydrating college text, the day finally arrived - a full day workshop with award-winning entrepreneur and famed academic Dr. Don Kuratko. Prior to the workshop, I had a chance to meet Dr. K and felt obliged to comment on his book - ok maybe not "obliged", but I certainly felt I had earned the right to issue a commentary. After explaining how delightfully painful it was to try to devour an entire college textbook over the course of a few airplane trips, he mentioned that others had suggested a non-textbook version of the material, which he felt would be difficult to do in a reasonable level of detail and/or value. I would say that Dr. K is suffering from the dreaded Curse of Knowledge, so I naturally recommended the Heath brothers' book "Made to Stick", which I had finally finished on the airplane the night before (I offered him my copy, but he was already planning to finish "Skin in the Game" on his return trip home).



Shockingly, he opened his session with a joke, something that business presenters quit doing in the early nineties. Even more shocking to me, though, was the delivery of the joke went really well and was quite relevant to the session - addressing, head-on, the fear that every business leader has when he is about to sit through a full day seminar with an academic. The joke was an admission that college professors are notorious for delivering information that is "absolutely correct and totally useless". Then he assured us that, over the next eight hours, he would break that paradigm...and he did!



After a brief review of the material and required reading list (my next read will be "A Stake in the Outcome", by the way), he moved into a familiar ice-breaker - with a twist. Anyone who has been to enough corporate workshops has likely had to introduce themselves and include an interesting, unusual or little known fact about their personal life. Dr. K had us do it artistically. Every person had to draw a picture and show the group - the picture representing a fact about the person that everyone did not know. Then the group had to guess what the illustration was depicting. I'm tucking that one away for future reference - it was really a fun variation on a common ice breaker.



But what really stuck out of the opening ice-breaker, was Dr. K's drawing:



Even more interesting was the accompanying story:

In the early 70's, Dr. K played football at Div. III John Carroll University (Don Shula's alma mater, if you didn't know). At the time, a college football magazine ran a story about how, in 1973, the college had to special order his uniform due to his unusual stature 5'6", 118lbs - (which, by the way, is one inch taller and 40 pounds lighter than Tyler, my ten-year-old). The uniform manufacturer, knowing that no college would need an extra-small (XS) uniform, mistakenly delivered the equipment to the grade school across the street. Later that season, Don was on the field waiting to receive a punt from the other team. During the normal hush that tends to come over a crowd just prior to a kick - an opposing fan yelled out "Look - it's a helmet with shoes."

For the rest of the session, I just couldn't look at Dr. K the same way....