— For C-level executives and HR professionals looking to elevate their strategic impact.—
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is noise before defeat.”— Sun Tzu
In my last post, I said most “strategic planning sessions” collapse strategy and planning together, an attempt to do everything — yet risk everything.
What we end up with is a TACTICAL-Strategy—and that’s not a bad thing. It helps us organize, clarify, and focus over the next few years. By filling in the blanks on a strategy template an executive team brings order out of chaos and executes more effectively.
Here’s the post if you missed it: Strategic Planning is Dead. Again.
But when I taught in the graduate school at Johns Hopkins, I didn’t realize that TACTICAL-Strategy was the clean part: goals, scorecards, and budgets laid out in crisp rows. And thank God for it. It keeps everyone aligned and accountable. It gives traction.
It just doesn’t win wars.
I was guilty of missing what this meant.
As I watched thousands of companies rise and fall, I saw the pattern. TACTICAL-Strategies are only part of it — the planning part. We’re missing something else far more important: the strategy that defines winning.
Conclusion: Winners use two strategies . . .
1) TACTICAL-Strategy
2) META-Strategy™
“If TACTICAL-Strategy was the clean part,
META-Strategy was the art I had been ignoring
—the ancient, messy, dangerous, intuitive art of out-maneuvering the enemy. “
Let’s define these 2 Types of Strategies
1. TACTICAL-Strategy
This is typically what we teach and apply in strategic planning. A 3+ year playbook—logical, structured, and absolutely necessary. Built around logic and analysis, it’s invaluable and indispensable. We use a template that forces us to fill in the blanks on key areas to define our:
-
Mission | Vision | Values
-
Purpose & Why Statements
-
SWOTs
-
Initiatives and Goals
-
Budgets & Financials
-
Resource Priorities
-
KPIs & Scorecards
-
Timelines & Milestones
-
Action Plans & Metrics
-
Followup Implementation Steps
It’s essential. Enables focus and accountability for the long-term. It keeps the trains running.
. . . and this drives our annual OPERATING-Plans — the one-year blueprint for execution.
EOS, Pinnacle, and numerous consulting groups excel at delivering these systems. Vistage’s new strategic planning platform now offers a fabulous online approach for doing this.
. . . but we need a META-Strategy that complements all this or, as Sun Tzu said, “Tactics without strategy is noise before defeat.”
2. META-Strategy
We often never see this in strategic development efforts.
This is NOT a plan.
It’s a pattern of thinking about winning.
Yes, this is totally different from the fill-in-the-blanks templates we use for TACTICAL-Strategies. It provides the lost art where you sense that the battlefield has moved. Or you feel that the real enemy is behind you, not in front. Or you’re not outmaneuvering anything, you’re just following a legacy path that leads nowhere.
This unique, belief-shifting approach reveals how to outmaneuver the enemy in order to actually win.
-
Redefine the battlefield.
-
Identify the real enemy (often not who or what you think).
-
Win by outmaneuvering in unexpected ways.
The essence of the META-Strategy™ :
-
Arises from intuition, not analysis.
-
Originates from art, not spreadsheets.
-
Is forged in creative tension guided by instinct, not meeting agendas.
It’s not a plan. It’s a reality perceived.
Its goal: change the rules of the game instead of preserving them.
Why It Matters
Most failed companies had a detailed TACTICAL-Strategy — but lacked a META-Strategy.
The META-Strategy
-
guides winning organizations; and has for millennia.
-
provides the foundation to build a strategic plan: the TACTICAL-Strategy
-
. . . and upon that foundation you build your operating plan for the year.
Why? Because military history teaches:
You can have flawless operations and still lose the war.
But with the right strategy, you can make plenty of operational mistakes—and still win.
You need both: Creation and Execution.
Like this:
In my next posts
I’ll share META-Strategy Secrets. A multi-part educational series revealing case-study examples from history and today, and how to build a META-Strategy.
—and why it’s the most misunderstood leadership tool in modern business.
Until then,
—Don
P.S. If your team is rethinking how you approach strategy—and wants to explore what META-Strategy looks like in practice—feel free to reach out. This is exactly what we help leadership teams do. You can reach me directly at [email protected].
© 2025 Don Schmincke. All rights reserved.
Call to Action
1) Forward this to friends and colleagues.
Let them join you in the revolution against the status quo.
2) Comment on your experience of this topic.
It helps our community a lot.
3) Go further (your competitors are reading this too).
The difference? They’ll keep running initiatives that change nothing. Keep complaining teams “lack urgency.” Keep creating plans that die in execution.
Or they’ll do what 75 executive teams do annually: Bring me in to show why their management theories fail—and what actually works.
Here’s what I don’t do: Workshops on “alignment”, motivational speeches, or ideas that sounds brilliant in the boardroom but die in implementation.
Here’s what happens instead: Your team learns the research from MIT, Johns Hopkins, and decades of fieldwork explaining why initiatives failed. Then we fix it.
“It’s the first event we’ve ever had where people actually implemented something.”
Whether a keynote, retreat, or offsite—the goal is the same:
-
Move the needle.
-
Make it unforgettable.
-
Create an experience where they actually do something differently afterward.
Press kit & inquiries: [email protected]
P.S.: My calendar is 60% booked through year end. Let’s talk. Your funding supports our research.
Responses