9
STRATEGY AND TACTICS
Objectives, strategy, tactics. That’s our order at Moorgate when planning a PR campaign. And it seems perfectly applicable as a route for execution when developing achievement motivation in individuals with a high fear of failure. So with the objectives written, we need to move to the next stage: establishing our “strategy,” although this immediately presents us with a problem. What – exactly – is a strategy?
The dictionary definition states it is the “art or science of the planning and conduct of a war,” which is helpful but too broad for me and, I suspect, many recovering High-FFs. We can be easily put off by ambiguities, with even the meaning of a word sometimes enough to halt our progress. And while many books have been written with the word strategy in the title, nearly all assume an understanding of the word and then promptly mix strategy and tactics without any recognition of their different roles in the pursuit of our goals.
“In order for a goal to be attainable, it must be operationally defined,” says Phillip C. McGraw, the author of Life Strategies (1999), which seemed the most obvious self-help book to consult because it was aimed at individuals rather than businesses.
The italics on “operationally defined” are mine because it jumped out at me as a possible definition of strategy, although – again – an operational definition could become confused with the practical day-to-day tactics and action points we employ.
After toying with this conundrum for a while I realized that, even in our PR campaigns, we tend to use the “strategy” section of our Campaign Plan – our key execution document that gives the client confidence regarding our aims for the campaign and the steps we are taking to achieve them – as a chance to summarize the objectives before translating them into relevant tactics and action points. In other words the strategy bridges the client’s goals and our actual actions – ensuring that our tactics (i.e. the executable action points) are focused on meeting the objectives. And this, to me, is the perfect definition of a strategy.
As a bridge between the objectives and the executable tactics, the strategy is therefore vital. For military planners trying to achieve their objective (victory) one strategy could be to execute “total war” – attacking by land, sea and air. This may seem like an obvious strategy in war, but it isn’t. Alternative strategies could be to wait for an opponent’s onslaught or operate a guerrilla campaign in enemy territory (yet even here we can quickly see tactical language slipping in). So a strategy of “total war” may lead, tactically, to the employment of company A – backed up by warship B and air squadron C – to storm beach X in month Y.
At Moorgate we have found that settling on a strategy for the client can be the most difficult part of a campaign – not least because it can seem so obvious at the start. Obvious strategies – like winning a war using the army, navy and air force – can result in objectives melding into tactics too readily, with potentially disastrous results.
For instance, a common objective in public relations is to generate warm sales leads for our clients. Most clients assume that such an objective translates into a strategy of generating news coverage via tactics such as writing and distributing news releases before lobbying for coverage in the press. But is such a strategy correct? Well that depends on the client. If our client is a challenger in the sector, perhaps just launching its offering, then a strategy of building public profile by generating news articles over a period of months will surely work best.
But what if the client is the entrenched market leader and is fending off the challengers? Perhaps the strategy here should be to profile their track-record, which would encourage tactics such as writing opinion-pieces or profile articles, or maybe case studies of happy customers. In both scenarios the tactics employed are very much a product of a strategy developed to suit the client’s strengths (and weaknesses), which differ greatly despite the identical objective.
This is important because, as Steven Silbiger says in The 10 Day MBA (1993), “strategic plans cannot be formed in a vacuum. They must fit organizations just as marketing plans must be suited to products,” which is in line with our need as individuals to undertake a campaign for progress that takes account of our strengths and weaknesses.
And there are other benefits to having a strategy, as outlined by Robert S. Kaplan in The Execution Premium (2008):
“Strategic initiatives represent the force that accelerates an organizational mass [or individual] into action, overcoming inertia and resistance to change,” making the strategy the key element for injecting momentum into our pursuits.
Indeed, in Life Strategies McGraw points out that having a strategy frees us from a “pointless and misguided reliance on willpower,” which he considers a myth – “an unreliable emotional fuel, experienced at fever pitch.”
Willpower will temporarily energize our efforts, he says – helping us to make the leap – but it will also bring us to a halt once the emotional responses to our early progress are spent. This makes willpower a dangerous energizer for High-FFs too used to being driven by their emotions and insecurities. Far better, says McGraw, to develop and execute a well-defined strategy – especially one that manages to remove our emotions as key drivers.
And Kaplan and Silbiger’s references to organizations point to another strength of having a strategy – our chance to depersonalize our goal-seeking endeavours. As stated in Part One, this is not about us as people. It is about us achieving our goals, which stand outside of any judgement about who we are. Depersonalization allows us to think of ourselves as companies – as Me Inc. – which means we are focused on achieving our objectives by developing a strategy and employing suitable tactics rather than focused on our concerns regarding how our actions look to outsiders. Such a focus clearly aids our judgement because we are no longer interpreting every bump in the road as a personal and final verdict, which also prevents setbacks from sabotaging our decision-making.
Sorry to labour the point, but outlining a strategy offers one final strength. As stated, at Moorgate we execute PR campaigns after first recording the strategy on a Campaign Plan that also contains the objectives, tactics and – as we are a PR company – the audiences and messages. The client then agrees all this and we execute. Yet if our tactics do not produce the desired results we can work our way back up the document, first questioning and replacing the tactics while assuming the strategy fine. Then, if this fails, we can reassess whether we have the right strategy, and finally we can re-evaluate the objectives.
We therefore have a structural confidence that allows us to execute without any nagging doubts regarding the achievability of the objective, which is put in its place at the very top of our Campaign Plan. Only after repeated tactical failures do we look at the strategy. And only after repeated strategic failures would we begin to question the achievability of the objectives.
There is a tremendous strength in recovering High-FFs adopting such an approach in my opinion. Tactical failures are simply action points that failed to produce the desired result. Yet those with fear of failure interpret even minor setbacks as affirmation of their inner and irretrievable awfulness. Not only is this patently untrue – a conclusion based purely on perception (although a potentially self-fulfilling one) – such a conclusion is impossible if we have, first, depersonalized our goals as part of a Me Inc. project and, second, divorced our strategy and tactics from our objectives so that setbacks in execution do not derail our progress towards our goals.
The war will be won. It is just a question of how.
So how do we determine the right strategy? As stated, we must tailor our strategy to our strengths and weaknesses, so these need to be assessed. One method we use for our clients is to first undertake a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, which we add to the Campaign Plan. SWOTs are also advocated by Harvard Business School, no less, in its book Strategy (2005), which again invokes the war analogy – stating that even the best battle plan is useless unless commanders understand whether their soldiers can carry it out. And this needs to take strengths and limitations into account.
From the SWOT we usually find that the strategy becomes clear, as it will tell us about our readiness for execution, our knowledge regarding the resources required and whether we have those resources to hand. It will also alert us to issues that may arise to destabilize us, as well as alternative tactics we can employ or consider employing – perhaps being opportunistic (previously the realm of those with high achievement motivation).
Again, this can work for individuals as well as companies. Certainly it worked for me when I set up Moorgate. My strategy needed to take account of the fact I had not one jot of PR experience and knew no one in the PR industry, but that I had strong journalistic skills and “good” experience in banking.
The objective was obvious – to create a successful financial PR agency starting with the major banks (the entities I best understood) as clients. But what then? I did a SWOT analysis and it was from this that the obvious strategy emerged, although one that would have remained hidden without such an exercise.
It went something like this:
So the obvious strategy emerged – focus on my former area of corporate banking using my strong journalistic skills as bait for those now struggling to execute their own PR. And the fact I had no track record in PR was irrelevant given my other experiences – in fact, given how poorly the existing PR agencies had performed in this area, it was an advantage.
A clear weakness, however, was my eroded contact base – a major failing for a PR. Yet having identified this as a weakness, I was able to direct my medium-term tactics (see below) in that direction. I contacted the few people I still knew in London and wangled meetings just to discuss the PR idea. I also accepted any offer to attend conferences or drinks parties and, importantly, kept networking after half the people I spoke to raised an eyebrow regarding my plans and excused themselves. Half the room didn’t, so I focused on them, especially the banker who started complaining about having to do his own marketing – including writing articles for English language magazines despite being Dutch.
In fact the SWOT led to one tactical mistake – which it could have also prevented had I paid it proper attention. The lack of contacts, and my specialist knowledge, fooled me into thinking I could approach other PR agencies and suggest a “white label” service for them to offer their existing clients. So focused was I on blind activity that I emailed a dozen or so agencies asking for a meeting and, of course, those that were to become my closest rivals were more than happy for me to reveal my plan for wrestling business away from them.
Had I known more about the PR industry I would have known that – like male Siamese Fighting Fish – no two agencies can ever be in the same room without trying to kill each other, which means handing over intellectual property to the competition is potentially suicidal. Yet my closest rivals failed to see how they were under-serving the sector so didn’t change their behaviour – meaning they didn’t catch-on to the potential of our methodology until Moorgate was well-established.
And, of course, without realizing it I’d hit upon a key strategic concept when starting a business: differentiation – a concept that works just as well for individuals.
“Specialization lines up where the world is going,” says renowned corporate strategist Jack Trout in his book Trout on Strategy (2004) stating that we should offer a key “point of differentiation” from others (including our peers) to establish our brand in the customer’s (or our boss’s) mind.
What are the trends in our area or targeted area, including our career or company? Where is that world heading? What is done badly? Why? How can it be improved? What are the barriers to this improvement? What role can we play? Do we want that role? If yes, what’s our strategy for achieving this?
But differentiation requires self-belief, especially when – as in my case – half the people we approach think we are crazy (often those with the most experience in a particular area). Yet experience executing PR as a banker – as well as my misguided meetings with other agencies – gave me the self-belief to realize my detractors didn’t matter. In fact they were the ones that persuaded me of the gap in the market for financial PR that didn’t involve blond bobs, dazzle-white teeth and flirty smiles (none of which I possessed).
Actually, I was grateful for their presence as they provided a strong benchmark for my differentiation. I could turn what I was not into a positive. Indeed, Steve Chandler (2001) encourages us to “exploit our weaknesses.”
We should turn the traits, tendencies and characteristics we most dislike about ourselves into signature assets, he says, citing Arnold Schwarzenegger who used his Austrian accent as a selling point for the movies and being a political outsider as a vote winner for politics.
And with the strategy decided we can move towards tactical execution – actually storming beach X in month Y. Researching the market for the right organization to work for is a tactic. A job application is a tactic. Developing a contact base in a particular industry is a tactic. Tactics are our immediate action points towards meeting our goals – often clustered under various headings such as relationship building, skill acquisition or research. They represent a big moment. This is the recovering High-FF’s equivalent of jumping out of the aeroplane and no amount of instruction, training and parachute-checking is going to take away the terror of that moment.
In fact, the preparation is our parachute. It will allow us to act – not least because in developing our strategy the next steps should appear logical if not obvious. An important point of principle here is that we must do what feels like the most logical next step. Have faith that the seemingly obvious thing to do is almost certainly the right next move – not least because it will be the product of all that planning. This is the moment we pull the lever on our machine, so the widget that comes out the bottom should, of course, look familiar.
“Simplicity is the first principle.”
At least that’s the advice of Sun Tze’s Art of War, as applied to business in Sun Tzu for Execution by US entrepreneur and Sun Tze enthusiast Steven W. Michaelson (2006). “If execution is more complicated than it needs to be it won’t be as successful,” he writes, while “… simple ideas, executed with gusto, have a tendency to work. And they work despite their shortcomings.”
It doesn’t take long for most business books discussing tactics to start quoting this famous Chinese war-focused philosopher. Yet Michaelson’s is an excellent application of Sun Tze’s philosophy because it focuses on execution. For instance he states that size is unimportant – “the battle doesn’t always go to the side with the biggest army” – while preparation is key, as is seizing a favourable position beforehand – “for Sun Tze a favourable position gave control over the battlefield.” Attitude is also important – “a positive attitude wins over a negative one” – as is speed – “speed is the essence of war” and opportunism – “if the enemy leaves a door open, you must rush in.”
Sun Tze – especially as translated by Michaelson – can put fire in our bellies for the battles ahead. But it may not work for everyone, especially as many High-FFs have poor experience of battles. Those with a high fear of failure often “retire hurt” from such fights feeling as if they have been tactically outmanoeuvred and physically outgunned, probably by someone who spends their evenings reading Sun Tze. Indeed, going back to those Atkinson-style experiments, battles are the very thing High-FFs hate most, making battle analogies off-putting when it comes to motivation.
Yet we are our own worst enemy in this respect. We are trying to beat our inner demons to make progress in our lives. And this requires fight. We cannot be pacifists in this endeavour. We will face external competition, whatever our goals. There are many applicants for every promotion or job, many companies vying for the business of our potential clients, many rivals for the attentions of our intended personal conquests. And we have rolled over too many times already in our lives.
Giving way to those High-AMs because, what the hell, they were bound to win in the end, is no longer a viable option. It is self-fulfilling defeatism that has no place in the thinking of a recovering High-FF. This is the point where we make our stand. So there is no escaping the fact we have a battle on our hands (although as we shall see, not all battles involve a win–lose outcome). And, in this respect, Sun Tze seems pretty apt in helping us mentally prepare.
If we are therefore reconciled to battle, how do we align our forces and move onwards to victory? What rules can we set for our tactics at this point to ensure they support our strategy? Indeed, what can all the testosterone-fuelled philosophies of Sun Tze offer us in today’s environment, where charging around an office dressed as a sword-wielding Chinese warrior is unlikely to be seen as appropriate behaviour?
As ever, I searched the business and personal texts for the definitive answers. But then I jotted down my own and thought these as strong as anything I could find from reading all those books: