There's an old Drucker quote "there's nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

If you're in the wrong market or building for the wrong customers you can execute brilliantly on everything you mentioned and it won't matter. The only thing that matters is product market fit or finding it if you don't have it. That's what I see as unsaid in your parent's comment about "execute what though?"

▲

andrewflnr 3 days ago | parent [-]

... yes. One of us is missing the point. It's probably me, but even if you're running a lawn care company there will be annoying details you have to get right. That's execution.

▲

heymijo 3 days ago | parent [-]

Perhaps it's more that we are looking at it from different levels. A contrived example to illuminate:

If I'm running a lawn care company in the desert I can get all those annoying details right and still be unsuccessful. So strategy is not opening a lawn care company in the desert.

If you think I'm missing something you are saying, please let me know!

▲

andrewflnr 3 days ago | parent [-]

Haha sure, that works. Or tailor your services for xeriscaping. The thing is, that's sufficiently obvious that it's not the kind of thing we're usually looking for when we talk about "strategy". Important, yes, but probably not what I was asking about.

So maybe there's "strategy" on the level of "sell something that non-zero people want", then there's execution on the details, and then a higher level of strategy that's maybe related to fine tuning product market fit, etc. But that feels like a weird discontinuity in "strategy" along the priority axis, and definitely doesn't fit with the conventional tone of "strategic thinking", which is definitely more on the "higher" level end of that spectrum.

	▲	rglynn 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I've typically heard the term "tactics" used to describe the lower level execution as opposed to the higher level "strategy".