A depressing number of people are going about saying that you cannot plan any more. Look at their diaries. They are full of plans – or are they? Is their endless round of entertainment, travel, meals with friends and family, networking (good heavens!) and other social happenings – is all this planning, or what? Some will call it “filler”; others, “despair”.

We treat ourselves like the tyre on a missile-launching tank and blow ourselves up fit to burst. In the end, we do burst. That’s when we need repair – medicine, hospital, surgery, rest.

We need something even more important but we seldom get it. We need strategy.

What are strategy and tactics?

Few people seem to know what is the difference between strategy and tactics. You would have thought of all the things parenting and education are supposed to impart to the young, an understanding of these two simple concepts would be top of the list. Not knowing the difference between objective and alertness warns us of a terrible waste of time and money.

You need them to know what to do next. Leadership of people is essentially “raising their eyes above the horizon to view their options”. It is strategy.

If colleagues don’t know what is beyond their line of sight, how can they decide whether or not to do it?

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Eye-raising is necessary to bring tactics into line with strategy. You can only do so if you are clear what your strategy is. How do you define and prepare a strategy?

First, state your purpose. 95 per cent of people say “well, we all know what that is, so no need to waste time on it”. Some even say “to make money”, not realising that wealth arrives as a consequence, not a purpose.

Actually, very few people know – or are in a position to understand – the purpose of a company or another person, sometimes even themselves. But they are in the right place to discover their own purpose or even invent a purpose if necessary. Very few do.

Tactics is simply implementation of strategy. As our leaders so often say, “whatever it takes”. Though it has to be mentioned that when used to suggest courage, loyalty, determination or faithfulness, it is often forgotten in practice.

Business involves battles but life isn’t a war

Our lives may consist of a series of battles but life itself is not a war, it is a journey. We want to know where is the culmination of that journey. Various versions of heaven and hell have proved remarkably successful in motivating people to behave better and strive for success. They are often being discarded now.

Increasingly, we, tautologically, “believe what we know”, and a certain cynicism has grown up about real faith, which is a belief in what we don’t know. In some ways that’s a good thing. A data-driven world will be more efficient, will have a chance to improve the fairer distribution of wealth and will be more easily understood.

But it is significant that in the personality test we use frequently to help people identify their purpose, two of the six elements – Dreams and Ambitions – are the ones people talk about most. Humanity needs a better strategy than turning everything into a process, as AI (artificial intelligence) is about to demonstrate to us.

Disney’s new strategy is an example to us all

An excellent example of a company going through its strategic rebirth is Disney. Bob Iger has identified a problem virtually every big business has. I might need to exclude Google and Microsoft and one or two other techies from this somewhat sweeping statement, but it is certainly true of many organisations, especially the not-for-profits of all sorts which seem particularly prone to the concept of the matrix.

Iger has decided to “de-matrix” and let people do the jobs for which they were hired and get paid. Doesn’t sound very novel but in today’s jumbled organisational melee it is an important rediscovery. At its root, it involves getting people to think for themselves more than simply following some SOP.

Being given tactics when you need a strategy

Those who work in overseas operations of American or European monoliths know very well what I am talking about. They receive a mass of orders, masked as “helpful suggestions”, that come flooding in every day. Bereft of local knowledge of either law or custom, these pieces of advice order behaviour that is possibly suitable for Texas to be implemented in South Korea. They are receiving tactics when what they need is strategy.

The head of McKinsey in London in the 1960s taught me a great lesson. He said that when running an overseas operation I was sure to be offered helpful advice by my head office. His recommendation was that I should not reply to the advice but send them a fat cheque instead. I tried it when I came to Singapore and it worked. They left me alone to build the business – but occasionally asked for another cheque.

Problems that created the matrix concept arose as businesses got bigger and communications got faster. Organisations became more complex and the telephone list ceased to be the “vade mecum” it had earlier served as. In its place HR was given a role of connecting people who might help each other.

The “dotted line” was born. Then the authority attached to it and the command associated with its use turned it into an order, not just a suggestion. The perhaps wrongly inferred limit imposed on other business relationships stopped letting people discover their own sources of help within the organisation. Initiative was fatally killed.

All business sizes matter

It is not possible to make every business small. You don’t build aircraft, or even aircraft engines, in a back-street garage. But your business hierarchy should remain as flat as possible and units should self-determine more than they are normally allowed to.

The top management of big business is there to decide strategy, not tactics. For a medium-sized or smaller business top management must devote some of its time specifically and exclusively to strategy. The reason so few SMEs grow into larger businesses is because their managements are always dealing with tactics, never with the critical strategy for the organisation.

To win a war, you must first plan a strategy. Every soldier and every politician commanding military action knows this. To execute a strategy, you must employ highly adaptable tactics. The regrettable war in Ukraine has demonstrated this well. Russia was so confident of its overwhelming power that it thought a series of tactical moves would win it control. Without a strategy, tactics become a jumble of opportunistic actions which seldom succeed since each move is a reaction, not an initiative. You only take the initiative when your strategy is clear.

Strategy and tactics are equally important - but the greater of these is strategy

There is no time in business or in life when tactics will consistently win for you. Unless you think strategically, all the tactical power in the world will not lead to a satisfactory conclusion.

You may destroy the other side by tactics alone, but only by killing them – in commercial terms, putting them out of business. If you do that you will almost certainly put yourself out of business, too.

Destruction is so much easier than building. But so much less than what we want out of life.

The writer is founder and chair at Terrific Mentors International