Strategic Direction

Management students and practitioners know well that focus on both strategic and operational issues is the key balancing act which the organization must accomplish for its healthy growth. Management focus on tactics and operational excellence ensures that the organization works at peak efficiency and profitability while the long term goals and aspirations of the organization are fulfilled by continuously monitoring and refining the strategy to accomplish the set goals. Senior management regularly finds itself torn between these two tasks and how best to allocate their focus so that none is ignored.

If we bring this same management concept to our individual lives, we can view each person as an organization which has survival (operational) needs as well as some long term goals and aspirations (strategic) needs which needs to be fulfilled. Focus needs to be maintained on both for the individual to be deemed successful in life.

Survival for humans in a day to day context means having enough money to live, which can also be called as going through the business of living. All of us spend effort, in terms of time and energy, to ensure that we are able to run our lives smoothly. This essentially means that we find different vocations and get about earning our living.

The strategic direction in life is more difficult to define than survival. The first part is to define the long term goals and aspiration. The best way that I can think is how Stephen Covey does it. Imagine that you are to die in 6 months or 1 year or whatever time frame you deem fit (but keep it short, 60 years does not suit our purpose) list down what all you want to do by then so that you consider your life meaningful. If you perform this exercise honestly and sincerely it should bring out from within you all that you value most and which is most important to you as a person. Now once these goals and aspirations are defined we need the strategy to achieve that and then implement it.

With this background if we look at our lives we will find that we spend an extraordinary amount of time on the tactical and the operational at the expense of the strategic. The first twenty five odd years are spent in a race at school or college fighting to get that top slot to get the most paying job. We read and write a lot but escape the learning bit which is most essential. The remaining part of our active life is spent trying to move into the next pay grade, take a lot of pains to be on the right side of our boss (whose name one will not remember in five years time) while ignoring people who are or can be our lifelong companions. We spend hours at end in office and burn the midnight oil on reports but do not find time to ask ourselves where we really want to go and what we want to become. Finally once out of the race it does dawn on some as to what they have lost but these few also are by now so habituated to only looking at the short term that there is no chance for a change.

This short term focus is a remnant of out animal nature from where we have evolved and holds us strongly in its sway. A cursory look at animal life displays similar patterns in which the animal is completely pre-occupied with surviving (read as winning the race from its predator) and finding food for itself (read as earning a living). This is all that the animal does in its lifespan. The advantage we have on the brute is our ability to think and give a strategic direction to our lives; if we do not use this faculty then we are underperforming on our potential by a wide berth.

It is high time to stop and take some time off from our daily business of life and give some thought to the strategy part and start work on it in right earnest so that we can have a meaningful and successful life.

But be quick because with life you never know!