{"id":1997,"date":"2010-07-23T14:17:09","date_gmt":"2010-07-23T14:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=1997"},"modified":"2025-01-12T21:41:43","modified_gmt":"2025-01-12T21:41:43","slug":"strategy-vs-tactics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/strategy-vs-tactics\/","title":{"rendered":"Strategy vs. Tactics"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>What is the difference between strategy and tactics? \u00a0In my experience, many people cannot tell the difference, and\/or speak as if they conflate the two. Personally, I have never had difficulty telling them apart.<\/p>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>The 18th-century British naval definition was that tactics are for when you can see the enemy&#8217;s ships, and strategies are for when you cannot.\u00a0 When you can see the enemy&#8217;s ships there are still important unknown variables, but you should know how many ships there are, where they are located, and (within some degree of accuracy) what hostile actions they are capable of.\u00a0 If you are close enough to identify the <em>particular<\/em> enemy ships that you can see, you may also know then the identities of their captains.\u00a0 With knowledge of past engagements, you may thus be able to estimate the intentions, the likely behaviors, and the fighting will of the ships&#8217; crews.\u00a0\u00a0 None of these variables are known when the ships lay beyond the horizon.<\/p>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>Thus, tactics describe your possible actions when you know who the other stakeholders are in the situation you are in, and you have accurate (although not necessarily precise) information about their capabilities, goals, preferences, and intentions.\u00a0\u00a0 To the extent that such knowledge is missing is the extent to which reasoning about potential actions becomes strategic rather than tactical.\u00a0 These distinctions are usually quite clear in marketing contexts.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>For instance, licking envelopes for a client&#8217;s direct marketing campaign is not strategic consultancy, nor is finding, cleaning, verifying, and compiling the addresses needed by the client to put on the envelopes. (This is not to say that either task can be done well without expertise and experience.) Advising a client to embark on a direct marketing campaign rather than (say) a television ad campaign is closer to strategic consultancy, although in some contexts it may be mere tactics. Determining ahead of time which segments of the potential customer population should be targeted with an advertising campaign is definitely strategic, as is deciding whether or not to enter (or stay in) the market.<\/p>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>The key difference between the two is that articulating a strategy requires taking a view on the values of significant uncertain variables, whereas articulating a tactic generally does not.<\/p>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is the difference between strategy and tactics? \u00a0In my experience, many people cannot tell the difference, and\/or speak as if they conflate the two. Personally, I have never had difficulty telling them apart. The 18th-century British naval definition was that tactics are for when you can see the enemy&#8217;s ships, and strategies are for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,29,35,38,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decision-theory","category-game-theory","category-history","category-intelligence-and-espionage","category-military-strategy","p1","y2010","m07","d23","h14"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1997"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13606,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1997\/revisions\/13606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}