How many times have you heard someone talk about successful business strategies or “taking a strategic approach”? What do you think they really mean by using the word strategy? Most of the time, the people who use it are trying to convey the fact that they have thought about the subject a little more than usual, that they have looked a little further ahead than usual. If a consultant uses it, be very careful. Strategy costs more than mere ideas or tactics. How much would you pay for consultants who have ‘discussed some ideas’ or ‘proposed some tactics that they think might work’? It depends on how good they are. But if they come back with ‘strategic business advice’, expect it to be very good and of course very expensive.

Why expensive? Because I would expect a consultant or colleague to have used some kind of intellectually sound framework, tested his assumptions, and developed more than one solution that he would rigorously evaluate before making his strategic recommendation. This requires time and expertise, both of which are expensive. Let’s assume they’ve done all of this – does that make it strategic trading advice rather than tactical advice?

Not according to the dictionary. The dictionary definition of strategy is very clear and military. He defines strategy as “the art of war: arranging troops, etc. in such a way as to impose on the enemy the conditions for fighting (time and place) preferred by oneself.” If we accept that business is really a war (you develop successful business strategies because you define success as beating the competition), there is no reason why this definition of the overused word, strategy, shouldn’t be appropriate for business strategy. It requires all of that planning and testing of assumptions already discussed. Some kind of robust and very honest intellectual framework will certainly help in developing and evaluating options. Even the lazy use of the word strategy, thinking a little harder and thinking ahead, would be implicit in the dictionary definition of military. But there is an additional dimension to the actual strategy. It requires you to do all of this and come up with something that changes the rules in your favor; in other words, it requires creativity.

And there is another aspect of this more demanding type of strategic thinking. It’s about people and their behavior. To ‘drop the troops in’ and change the rules, you have to understand how people work. If being creative involves changing behaviors, then you need to understand how those behaviors were formed in the first place, and how they could be changed if you want a successful business strategy.

Before you put the dictionary away (the definition of strategy above is taken from the Oxford English Dictionary), just jump to tactics. You will find that the definition is exactly the same as for strategy with one addition. Tactics involve the most important stage of implementation, putting the strategy into practice. So it turns out that, far from tactics having less weight and value than strategy, they are actually the most valuable of all. A strong strategic plan that is successfully implemented includes, indeed requires, tactics.

The use, and overuse, of strategy in business is, in most cases, a pretentious statement by people who don’t really understand what they are talking about. It certainly doesn’t mean thinking a little more about something or thinking a little more long-term. It absolutely demands a thorough and honest evaluation of your assumptions and your options. At the risk of being melodramatic, sloppy thinking in military strategy costs people their lives. In business you only waste time and money. Strategic thinkers will, of course, use frameworks based on their experience. They’ll break down a problem so they can think about each component, but they’ll look to change the rules, not just apply them. And the true strategist understands that strategies are aimed at people and at changing their behavior. Strategic business advice from him will be based on an understanding of human behavior. Just like in war, a strategy not only gets the job done, but allows you to beat the competition, generate higher returns than ever before, win, and win big with the least expenditure of resources.

So whether you’re conducting a brand planning strategy, a new business launch strategy, or any other type of strategy, remember what this really means and remember to include the tactics that are, if not most, important. Then you can charge accordingly.