Are you a tactician or a strategist?

As you probably know, there is many confusion around the term “strategy”, especially when it is applied to the business world.

Perhaps that the military origin of the word is the main cause of this misunderstanding. In ancient Greek “strategos” means litteraly “the one who is conducting the army”. That is true that on the battlefield there is sometimes no clear boundaries between a strategy and a tactic.

In a company, this sort of confusion could cost you Market and value shares. The fact to define a sum of initiatives as a strategy is a mistake. It is just about finding the most appropriate operational moves to rectify some business issues.

For me the word strategy should be use when the whole company agree around a main objective to be reached in the next two or three years.

It means being able to define the main ambition in one or two sentences such as : “becoming the number two of the X Market, achieving a minimum Market share of Y% and remain profitable with Z% margin”. A qualitative ambition (about innovation,brand awareness or eco-responsibility for example) could be add. But this is the idea and with a clear announced strategy, you will be able to align immediately your whole team and consequently benefit from this competitive advantage.

This is why I have created the O.S.R.P strategy framework. I had on my mind the aim to facilitate the revenue prioritization exercise which is a necessary step before the definition of the strategy such as mentioned here above.