Defining Strategy

Strategy is foreseeing and deciding what one to become in the future by working out the plans to achieve
the vision by allocating the resources and executing the plan. Strategy is about having a perception of
your goals which is based on 4 questions

 Where you are going.

 Why you are going there.
 How you are getting there.
 What is different (unique) about how you are getting there.

Strategy is essentially about competing to be unique. However, there are three common mistakes when
thinking about strategy.

 Strategy is not a goal (the strategy is the how).

 Strategy is not a single action (the strategy is holistic understanding of how).
 Strategy is not a mission-vision-intent (the strategy is made up of specific and concrete
choices on how to compete).

There are two broad areas of strategy in business. Corporate strategy tries to answer the question,
"What should be done by my organization, and how will I manage the things that need to be
done, but that I'm not doing." Business strategy tries to answer, "How do I do as well as possible
with what I've chosen to do?"

Corporate Strategy
Corporate level strategies are concerned with questions about what business to compete in.
Corporate Strategy involves the careful analysis of the selection of businesses the company can
successfully compete. Corporate level strategies affect the entire organization and are considered
delicate in the strategic planning process.
Business Strategy
A business strategy is a set of competitive moves and actions that a business uses to attract
customers, compete successfully, strengthening performance, and achieve organizational goals. It
outlines how business should be carried out to reach the desired ends.
Business strategy equips the top management with an integrated framework, to discover, analyze
and exploit beneficial opportunities, to sense and meet potential threats, to make optimum use of
resources and strengths, to counterbalance weakness.

Defining Tactics
Tactics are techniques and actions you perform to solve immediate problems.  Strategy is the larger
idea of intent and plan.  Your strategy answers the question, "where are you going?" Your tactics
answers the question, "How do you plan to get there."  Where tactics and strategy really diverge is
that the quality of your strategy has no direct bearing on its quality of execution.  Whereas tactics
are nothing more than execution of varying levels of quality.