Tactics vs Strategy: A Case Study from Stanford University

by Mike Ihezuo

This case happened in Stanford University. Read intently, you’ll learn/gain a lot from Tactics & Strategy differences. Mike Ihezuo had a deep look at it.

Most Stanford students failed this challenge. Here’s what we can learn from their mistakes.

You’re a student in a Stanford class on entrepreneurship.

Your professor walks into the room, breaks the class into different teams, and gives each team five dollars in funding. (Teamwork work out team goals. No Team, No Success. QED). Your (team) goal is to make as much money as possible within two hours and then give a three-minute presentation to the class about what you achieved.

*Options Open to You*

If you’re a student in the class, what would you do?

Typical answers range from using the five dollars to buy start-up materials for a makeshift car wash or lemonade stand, to buying a lottery ticket or putting the five dollars on red at the roulette table or … (think). Do you *THINK*, or gist,  gossip or browse Facebook?

But the teams that follow these typical paths tend to bring up the rear in the class.

The teams that make the most money don’t use the five dollars at all. They realize the five dollars is a distracting, and essentially worthless, resource.

So they ignore it. Instead, they go back to first principles and start from scratch. They reframe the problem more broadly as “What can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?” (Technically, in entrepreneurial, we say/call this starting business on a [*bootstrapping*] *shoestring budget*).

One particularly successful team ended up making reservations at popular local restaurants and then selling the reservation times to those who wanted to skip the wait. These students generated an impressive few hundred dollars in just two hours. Imagine! Hope you’re still with me?

But the team that made the *most money* approached the problem differently.

How are your *Problem Solving Skills, Problem Management Skills?*. Leaders or Entrepreneurs are what they are {leaders or entrepreneurs} because they SOLVE PROBLEMS. Do you solve problems or create problems? Some CEOs, Managers, Governors and Presidents create problems and arguments on TVs instead of solving people’s problems!

The group that made most money realized that both the $5 funding and the 2-hour period weren’t the most valuable assets at their disposal. Rather, the most valuable resource was the *three-minute presentation time* they had in front of a captivated Stanford class. They sold their three-minute slot to a company interested in recruiting Stanford students and walked away with $650.

How good are you in identifying your personal assets and liabilities, hence, how good are you in *Personal Resources Management*? I call it and teach it in my Personal Development Seminars (PDS) as PRM, note not HRM.

The five-dollar challenge illustrates the difference between tactics and strategy. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to different concepts.

Let me quickly and smartly say they are similar and at same time different. A strategy is a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics, in contrast, are the actions you undertake to implement the strategy.

Tactics is on the spot acts. I’m overfeeding you! Isn’t it? See it’s implemented on next paragraph.

The Stanford students who bombed the $5 challenge fixated on a *tactic*—how to use the five dollars—and lost sight of the strategy. If we focus too closely on the tactic, we become dependent on it. “Tactics without strategy,” as Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War, *“are the noise before defeat *.  So, you must have a strategy before tactic, but *”strategy with out tactic makes you toothless bulldog”*, says Mike Ihezuo.

Just because a $5 bill is sitting in front of you doesn’t mean it’s the right tool for the job. “Don’t rush to options or opportunities without studying it”, emphasises Mike Ihezuo. Not all opportunities are your own possibility. Tools, as Neil Gaiman reminds us, *“can be the subtlest of traps.”* When we’re blinded by tools, we stop seeing other possibilities in the peripheries. It’s only when you zoom out and determine the broader strategy that you can walk away from a flawed tactic.

*Can I Ask You Question?*

What is the $5 tactic in your own life? How can you ignore it and find the 2-hour window? Or even better, how do you find the most valuable three minutes in your arsenal?

Once you move from the “what” to the “why”—once you frame the problem broadly in terms of what you’re trying to do instead of your favoured solution—you’ll discover other possibilities lurking in plain sight.

I know I’ve raised many dust, have overfed some, or left some in lurch, but that’s a scratch, not the MAIN? Get Mike speak to your organization, ministry, family, group for impart and impact.