Stop Saying you're "Strategic"

If there is one word I hear ad nauseam, it is “strategic.” I can’t tell you how many résumés and cover letters I review from strategic strategists who are focused on creating, crafting, implementing, executing, defining, and enabling strategies, strategic pursuits, and just general strategizing.

#STRATEGY

I am reminded of Inigo Montoya, as portrayed by the incomparable Mandy Patinkin: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“Strategy” originated as a military term. It means using a nation’s forces through large-scale, long-range planning and development to ensure victory. “Strategy” differs from “tactics” in that tactics deal with the use and deployment of troops in actual combat. In other words, strategy is the plan of action that moves you closer and closer until you eventually achieve your goal. Tactics are the actual steps that get you there.

At some point in the 1990s, “strategy” became the word to describe anything that anyone in business did, ever. Maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole. But maybe not. Nonetheless, it is by far the favored buzzword of every office worker out there. And because of that, no one knows what it means anymore. We sit in meetings where we review strategies. We are encouraged to think strategically. And of course, we extoll the importance of being strategic in general.

Which adjectives would you use to describe your professional persona? If all you can come up with is “strategic” or a variation thereof, you need to do some serious thinking.

Hey, who doesn’t love proactive synergies, especially when they’re strategic?

I’m done. Stop it. Stop telling everyone how stupefyingly, supersonically strategic you are. Show me.

How do you advance yourself, your team, your product?

How do you define what the goals are?

What is an example of how you create a plan to get to your end point?

Don’t just say you’re strategic. Demonstrate it. Otherwise, it’s just another overexposed, overused, empty word. I know the answer to this vexing problem! Let’s use visionary (Not).