Salij MacNeacail, who is very smart, kicked off a good discussion on the comments of an old post, "The Philosophical Disposition vs. The Results Disposition."
You might find the whole discussion interesting and worth reading; there are a lot of good points in there.
One part that was flattering and made me write out my current conception of strategy was this,
I thought of the following while walking just now: one of the reasons I appreciate/value your blog so much, is that you don't divorce theory from practice... Effective strategy is a happy marriage between theory and practice, or between philosophy and action...
Here, then, is my current understanding of how strategy gets shaped and turned into action, and results --
Philosophy dictates strategy. By philosophy, I mean the code people choose to live by, consciously or subconsciously. In Carlyle's On Heroes, he talks about how every man has a religion, and it's not the one they proclaim in church, but rather what they value most deep-down. For many people, that's comfort or pleasure. That's their religion, effectively. But for others, they consciously formulate what they value and adjust it over time.
When you know what you want (philosophy, values, strategy, whatever... I call it "philosophy") -- then comes strategy, which is the large and broad way of pursuing what you want. So if you thought that preserving Planet Earth was the most important thing (philosophy), you'd still have to strategize about what areas of impact would be most worthwhile, where to start, what order to go in, how to prioritize, tradeoffs, etc.
Out of strategy comes tactics. Tactics are individual actions to drive towards your strategy. So if you thought that reforestation was the most important thing, what areas would you reforest? Would you plant trees yourself, or try to get groups of people together to do it? Who would pay for it? In areas with drought, would you run irrigation too as part of tree-planting? These are tactics.
What I learned -- largely the hard way -- is that even excellent philosophy, strategy, and tactics by themselves don't lead to much. A consistency of action that leads to getting additional multipliers together is necessary. Having great customer service erratically and haphazardly doesn't build a great reputation; a great reputation is built through consistently and always having great customer service.
That goes beyond strategy and tactics -- into operations.
I call operations "the coordination of tactics over time" -- which reflects that even excellent tactics, by themselves, might not harmonize and lead to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Operational excellence is almost always useful to a greater or lesser extent, but excellent operations without a good strategy can easily lead to "won the battle, lost the war" -- or executing very well on policies that are actually ineffective.
There is, of course, a feedback loop between all of these. I realized somewhat early that strategy and tactics were worthless if you didn't know what mattered to you (philosophy), but I realized somewhat late that being able to sustain and build upon working tactics (operations) is critical. It's great operations that lets us repeatedly do winning actions and consolidate the gains from them.
You might have seen that reflected here over the last few months. I'd get things tactically correct for a while, but then they'd fall off. Operational skill is the largest thing I'm driving on right now; I decided around two months ago that it was worth spending a lot of time and energy to start training towards world-class in it. The early returns from doing so have been very promising.