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I was recently promoted to run our Marketing Dept. - reporting to the CEO. It has been about one year and I now finally have the team in place to delegate more of the tactical projects to - which allows me to be more "strategic".

My question is, "What does this mean - strategic?" What sort of functions or responsibilities fall under strategy?

A new/young "executive" finding his way - any help is appreciated.

Peter.westley's picture
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rmpugnier;

In my opinion the word strategy is over-rated and was probably coined to help executives hide their incompetance.

I suggest, if you haven't already, read Peter F. Drucker's "The Effective Executive". It's the top listed book on M-T's reading list. This should help make a number of things clearer for you in this area and it's not a long read.

Peter

bflynn's picture

[quote="rmpugnier"]I was recently promoted to run our Marketing Dept. - reporting to the CEO. It has been about one year and I now finally have the team in place to delegate more of the tactical projects to - which allows me to be more "strategic".

My question is, "What does this mean - strategic?" What sort of functions or responsibilities fall under strategy?

A new/young "executive" finding his way - any help is appreciated.[/quote]

I'm working on something to help you out. The past few weeks have been dedicated to completing a summer school course, but the last class is tonight, so I should have some free time over the next three weeks.

The basics as described by Michael Porter - its about using your strengths and minimizing weaknesses while exploiting opportunities and mitigating threats. There is a structured thought process to go through to discover these things, one that doesn't take all that long to do. I'll write up a base article and try to give an example.

If you're just itching to get started, check out your local university library. Search their journal database for HBR articles by Michael Porter. Otherwise, I'll try to summarize in a week or two.

Brian