Strategy Vs. Tactics

I was reminded of the howls from some pundits after a McCain-Obama debate in which the subject of “strategy” came up. The refrain from the left was: “This guy doesn’t even know the difference between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics.’”

The truth is, people have been arguing about the difference between strategy and tactics for centuries and there is no concrete consensus on the difference. Most people have an overall sense that strategy relates to “bigger” things and tactics more to “small” things. Many others think strategy is somehow better than tactics when it comes to planning.

And, more often, one will hear someone in the workplace telling someone else to think or act “strategically” — when what they really mean is “be smarter.”

Like the term “leadership,” it is a shorthand for a larger idea — but for most people this idea is ill-defined.

This debate came back to me when I saw an argument at e.politics about whether Twitter is a “strategy” or a “tactic.”

I learned strategic planning from one of the people who helped develop our modern understanding of it. While strategic planning has changed many times since it was first elaborated in the late 60′s, this definition from my mentor always sticks with me:

“Strategy is a decisive allocation of resources.”

In other words, a strategy is something that, if you pursue it, other avenues are foreclosed. Many different tactics, on the other hand, could be used in the pursuit of a particular strategy.

In most cases, I’ve found that the answer to this question depends on the size of the theater. What is a tactic when looked at from one level can be a strategy at another level.

As an example, a company might have a strategy to use social media as its primary marketing communications tool. It would use various tactics to achieve that: blog comments, Facebook pages, Twitter, and so forth.

However, depending on the size of the theater you are looking at, a tactic can become a strategy. Just thinking about the fictitious company’s “social media” strategy, imagine the marketing department that is charged with implementing this. The fact that the overall thrust is social media will now be a given, just a parameter. The strategic decisions at this level really will center on which tool to use and how strongly to bet on it.

Agents, Come Out Of The Shadows

Seth Godin wrote recently about the plight of agents. Literary agents, travel agents, stock brokers, real estate agents — all either extinct or becoming so. Why? Anonymity:

The problem with being a helpful, efficient but largely anonymous middleman is pretty obvious. Someone can come along who is cheaper, faster and more efficient. And that someone might be the customer aided by a computer. . . .

Middlemen add value when they bring taste or judgment or trust to bear on a transaction that isn’t transparent. . . . Key point: anonymous agents are interchangeable and virtually worthless. Agents that don’t do anything but help one side find the other side in a human approximation of Google aren’t so helpful any more.

Does that mean the business of being an agent is dead? No! It means it’s time to make sure you’re not anonymous. Add value that can’t be added otherwise — and that is where discernment comes in. Agents can provide a powerful filtering (or editing) function.

But, in order to provide this function, agents need to say “no,” perhaps as often or more than they say “yes.” This means they need to brand their own identity as someone who is a helpful nexus of good content, be that content a steady stream of well-priced homes, a stable of awesome authors, or a collection of well-performing startups.

This may mean there is room for fewer agents in the world, but it also means that the ones who are left can play a more important role.

Journalism — How Expensive Must It Be?

There is a lot of angst within the journalism (and journalism-curious) community lately, as there have been a controversial suggestion that the best way to reinvent journalism would be to make it a nonprofit, charitable endeavor.

One organization, the Voice of San Diego, gives a glimpse of what hard-hitting journalism can look like under a nonprofit model. A recent LA Times profile of VSD is fascinating.

But what really grabbed me was this paragraph:

Because it doesn’t have to print newspapers, Voice of San Diego puts the majority of its $825,000 annual budget into salaries for its 11 journalists, who make from $35,000 to roughly $70,000 and focus on government, education, law enforcement, real estate and science.

For a news organization, $825K is a small budget. But from where I sit, as the purveyor of a completely volunteer local news site, with a budget under $100 in direct costs per year — it seems Gargantuan. My main reactions are twofold:

1. I want to try to “grow up”
2. I think good journalism can be done for cheaper

I am not sure what it would look like, and I have a hunch I may be wrong, but . . . we’ll see.

Electric Bicycles: Their Time Never Came

Some of my friends know that, hidden in my dim, dark past, I used to do something involving electric bicycles. I’m here to tell you that, yes, it’s true and it was a colorful period of my life.

While I was working for then-California Controller Gray Davis, I met up with a charismatic man who had the vision thing in spades. His name was Malcolm Bricklin.

Malcolm was an automotive entrepreneur. He was the first American to get a perpetual license to import a Japanese vehicle — the Subaru. He parlayed that as a young man into quite an empire, and then sold out. His later efforts were not as successful, though they all had their silver linings and interesting moments. When Fiat quit importing the Spider, Malcolm stepped in and imported it with the “Bertone” badge. He created the Bricklin gull-wing door car (which enthusiasts still swear by and, I am given to understand, on which the DeLorean is based). He had an idea for cheap cars for the masses and created the Yugo — which, say what you want about it, but it was cheap.

In fact, that was Malcolm’s main vision: inexpensive cars, accessible for everyone.

He also had another vision. He thought electric vehicles were the wave of the future. Of course, he was right — just about fifteen years ahead of his time.

When I met Malcolm, he was trying to get an appointment with my boss, Gray, to talk about a new idea he had that would need some political support. There was a giant, shuttered General Motors factory in Van Nuys (the Valley area of Los Angeles). Malcolm wanted to use that as a factory to convert gasoline-powered cars into electric. The idea was this: You give Malcolm’s company your car and, say, $10,000 — and they give you back your same car but electric-powered.

While I think that is a cool idea, it never took off. But I was mesmerized, and so I left politics and went to work for Malcolm.

After trying to get electric cars off the ground for a time, Malcolm (and his business partner, a former GM Delco chairman and Hughes executive, coincidentally named Malcolm Currie) determined that the choke point in the whole enterprise was the battery industry. This fact is still being rediscovered today. There just is not enough capacity worldwide to make the number of high-tech batteries that would be needed for electric vehicles to be mass-manufacturable. Part if the reason that there was (and is) not enough capacity is that the battery companies did not see enough of a market. What if they built the factories and no one bought the batteries?

So Malcolm shifted gears. He needed to show the battery companies that if they built them, people would buy. 

Thus was born the EV Warrior electric bicycle. Malcolm created the Electric Bicycle Company and developed an infrastructure through car dealers to sell the bikes.

The bikes had a casing on the back where a rack would be, that contained a motor and a battery. Press a lever on the handlebar, and the motor would kick in, propelling the bike up to about 15 miles per hour. (The image is from our promotional materials.)

It was an idea that had a great deal of merit, but the product was not up to the task and probably did not have a market. The bikes were very top heavy, the drive mechanism was finicky, and we never got quality control quite right.

We were also saddled with a bunch of weird regulations. Turns out if you slap even a low-powered motor on a bike it becomes a “vehicle.” That brings with it a host of issues. We had to create VIN numbers, meet Department of Transportation regulations, which included having headlights that were as powerful as car headlights, and riders had to wear motorcycle helmets and typically get special motorcycle licenses in order to ride the things. We’re talking bikes with little motors, here, and all this rigmarole just about killed the idea before it started.

But that was my job. The helmet and license thing. Me and a colleague, transportation consultant Ryan Snyder, went around to state capitals trying to get the laws changed in order to allow people to actually ride these things. Ryan had more success than I did with his states, but together we were able to get the law changed in California and I went on to get the law changed in Oregon and Washington states. W00t! The basic idea was simple: we created a new “class” of vehicle called the “electric assisted bicycle.” This new class of vehicle could be ridden without a special license, only on streets (not sidewalks), and anyone under 16 had to wear a helmet — but a bike helmet, not a motorcycle helmet. 

The company eventually folded before we really got going, but this was an exciting, if brief, period in my life. The characters I met were fascinating. Malcolm himself was a walking, charismatic bolt of lightning. But there were others: an erotic sculptor who designed the motor casing; the inventor of the “extended warranty” who did — well, I am not sure what, but car dealers thought he was a magician for inventing that thing; a former ad man and Bible scholar who was Malcolm’s right hand.

Once EBC closed I continued to do the same state capital work for some other electric bicycle firms (yes, there were others, making the Charger and the Zap) but that was not successful. The heyday had come and gone.

I am sure some of my readers are wondering: Did he register as a lobbyist in these states? To be honest, I cannot remember the details. I believe I did. Or at least I tried. But at some point, I also recall we got an opinion that, since I was working  only on one issue, I did not have to.

Here and there, though, you can see police forces using electric bicycles — mostly the Charger and Zap. The EV Warrior? Not so much — too heavy. More often, they are a curiosity hidden in various people’s garages. Will they ever emerge?

We’ll have to wait and see.

P.S. What happened to the Electric Bicycle Company? It was eventually purchased by Lee Iacocca. He renamed the company EV Global. That company no longer exists either.

(Image of Bricklin SV-1 from Motorbase.)

Car Execs Came To Town, Riding On A Pony

I grew up in Detroit when times were tough and it wasn’t pretty. But looking at how the heads of the Big Three are responding to the crisis that faces them makes me think that there may be too many auto companies in my hometown.

While the new reorganization plans the Big Three unveiled yesterday have aspects to recommend them (for example, GM axing Saab and Saturn) the amount of prodding it took to get to this level of change makes you wonder how serious the companies are about following through.

What’s galling though, is how the car execs seem roundly out of touch with reality.

Ford’s Mulally says he’ll actually use his own product to get to the DC hearings where the automakers must show lawmakers better restructuring plans — and then others say “Me too! Me too!” But this only comes after they got heat for taking private jets to go beg for taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, GM has gone cost-saving happy. They’ve turned off voicemail for employees and have stopped putting batteries in their wall clocks. A spokeseman says “It’s all good business practices, but now it’s extreme business practices to the point where we’re not wasting anything.” Huh? (I’ll have to turn off my voicemail and tell my clients it’s the new sig-sigma.)

And GM’s president actually claims that there is no “plan B” beyond a government bailout, which strains credulity.

The auto manufacturers are desperate — but are they desperate enough to truly change?

Taxonomy of Project Managers

Like many of my friends, I am a “consultant,” which means I work on “projects” for “clients.” Those clients are typically organizations. My point of contact is usually a “project manager.” I’ve encountered six kinds:

• Dishrags – Totally passive. See their role as “passing on feedback.” Can’t take a stand and don’t control process. Random problems crop up due to fringe opinion at odd times.
• Bureaucrats – Burned out, tired. Avoid responsibility by appearing to be responsive.
• Shotgun – Keep sending everything to everybody. In pursuit of a freewheeling ethos where everyone feels really busy but nothing happens.
• Meeting Makers – Too collaborative and methodical. Seek consensus on every move through conference calls and meetings. Good . . . but sloooww.
• Iron Fist – So tightly control the process that no one is sure what is happening. Only point of contact; nothing gets by them. All decisions are theirs. Often surprises from the boss at the end…she or he has not been kept in the loop.
• Good! — “Sweet Spot” between Iron Fist and Shotgun. They will make decisions, but they know when to bring in others in their organization. They have ownership of the project, but know that it’s not just their show. The project gets done.

No doubt there are more…what kind of project managers have you encountered?