“In warfare, amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics.”
The five-star General Omar Bradley, in charge of diverse World War II operations, could easily tell who to trust by observing officials presenting their plans. The general’s simple criteria are also applicable to business.
In the above context, logistics meant placing the right people, information flow, decision-making, materials, and tools at the right place and time to execute the strategic intent. Executives must distinguish between plans that contain only vision (strategy) and those that describe who will do what and how it will be executed (logistics).
If you think this is obvious, pause and think it over. Revisit the last strategy discussion you participated in. The separation between strategy and tactics is nice for MBA curricula or theoretical books. Reality demands pragmatism. Generals who only craft rationale and tradeoffs, but leave it to their lieutenants to sort out who will do what, how troops move from A to B, and prepare contingency, risk of being surprised in battle. More often than not, logistics are sorted out after the fact.
When business generals fail to ask about operational logistics, a fancy strategy ends in a resounding defeat. In my career, I have been surprised on the battlefield more than I would have liked. I witnessed the following case firsthand.
A group of developers rolled out a service to collect farming data and return advice to the client. The team expected that efficiency improvement in farming practices would generate substantial savings. Money and hours were poured into the prototype, which sold relatively quickly. And then, at the same pace, an operational failure killed the entire endeavor.
Since the team proposed a vision without logistical planning, things went ugly fast. Their prototype used manual data input from clients. Their strategy assumed clients would gladly take on this boring task. Real users were actually smarter. They end up using a built-in feature to send pictures of the data instead. Hundreds of clients were flooding the application daily with images of data, but not entering data in the input fields. The company gave up when the professional developers became amateurs, scrambling to manually copy daily images for an overwhelming number of users.
It’s easy to blame the development team for such an error. Yet this team reported to a technical director, who, in turn, reported to a unit director, who reported to a board division. The entire project was revised and debated before receiving substantial funding from several stakeholders. None of them asked how the crucial element of the strategy, farm data, would be brought from reality into the digital realm of that tool.
Someone once said that poor culture eats strategy. Have you ever thought about how this excuse sounds to a five-star general on the battlefield? Scapegoating. The lack of operational logistics kills strategy way before anyone thinks of it as breakfast.
The Unconscious Skill 