Enough already! Your work life is busy enough without someone telling you that you need to do still more things. Demands from your bosses, subordinates and customers inundate you. There is barely time to check your email, never mind respond to the flood of requests, meetings and other required activities. And then there is the business environment where survival alone seems to be a high goal. “Please” you want to say. No more. Not now. Not for me.

On the other hand, the vulnerabilities in business have never been clearer to you. Many good people that you know are out of work and suffering. You have dodged the bullet so far but you know that your company needs to do better. If the company does not win, your job may be the next to go. You remember a time, not so long ago, when ambition and possibilities motivated you more than fear. You enjoyed that time. It was a time of hard competition but winning, not just surviving, dominated your thinking.

It is time to think about winning again. It is time to take the measure of the competitors left standing and to attack. It is time to put together strategies that comprehend the market realities, accentuate your company’s strengths and exploit your competitors’ weaknesses.

How will you do all of that?

Let the CEO hatch the grand schemes. Let the General Manager make the management presentations and get the credit. Let Marketing create their wonderful stories about the future. Let the Product Manager be the face that most associate with the product. Your job, simply put, is to make their dreams possible. You, and your teams, organize the people, harness the technologies, execute the processes and deliver the products that fuel all of those dreams.

Most of the time, you have to focus on the concrete. There is not time to think fancifully or speculatively about the future. Taking your eye off the ball means that something could slip and that would result in many unhappy people. You take pride in avoiding such disappointments. You are reliable, conscientious and inclined to precision.

Still, you are not oblivious to what is happening in the world and among your competitors. Their engineering organizations are trying to beat yours. Some of the things that they do are outstanding. Their technology bets are sometimes different from yours. Product teardowns have given you insight into their product architecture and there are things to admire. You wonder if you doing everything that needs to be done to win. What should you be learning and changing to stay in front? How would you know?

It is a balancing act. Keep the processes humming while surveying the competitive landscape occasionally to understand where and how to improve. It would be great to have help with this. Perhaps Competitive Intelligence could help. Here are some possibilities.

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It probably wasn’t until I spent time in Malindi, Kenya, that I got a visceral sense of what it meant to be in the minority. My skin was far lighter, my hair was different and my clothes seemed out of place. I was a “mzungu” (white person). The people were quite kind yet I knew that most of the social adaptations would have to come from me. For a relatively brief time I felt what minorities must feel all the time when they live permanently with people different from themselves.

What does skin color and social background have to do with strategic or tactical thinking?

Only the recognition that the world is dominated by tactical thinking and a strategist will always be in the minority. “Minority thinking” means that most of the time the strategists must adapt to the tacticians rather than the inverse. It does not mean however that strategists are less valuable or needed. And it does not mean that strategy is unimportant. But a strategist that only masters strategic thinking without understanding how to act tactically will most likely fail (or at best succeed sporadically).

The critical implication is that a strategist has a particular requirement to speak two languages. First, there is the native language of strategy. Second, there is the foreign language of the majority that is primarily tactical.

Say something strategic to most tactical people and it would be like a Kenyan saying something in Swahili to me. Aside from “hakuna matata” (no worries) and a few other phrases, I would be lost. Similarly, when strategy encounters a tactical mindset, the strategist faces the likely outcome that they will be misunderstood unless they follow some simple rules.

Here are 5 powerful rules that can help guide a strategist’s behavior and translate their message.

A couple of days ago a friend of mine called to borrow a specific tool. He was going to start a repair to his riding lawnmower and needed a torque wrench. He has a large number of tools already – screwdrivers, saws, sockets, pliers, drills, etc. – that he has previously used to make or repair things around his house. However, on this day and for this lawnmower repair project, he needed something that he did not already have. So what did he do? Well, he started with the first and most powerful tool that he had to find the tool that he was missing. He called someone that he knew. Now it turns out that I was no help that day since I didn’t have a torque wrench. However, if he secretly didn’t want to buy the tool, I could have easily connected my friend with someone else that had a torque wrench to lend.

There are three lessons that are significant.

1. It is possible to anticipate the need for certain tools. When that is the case, it is best to get them as soon as possible. For example, every homeowner (or mechanic) needs a hammer. Everyone needs an assortment of screwdrivers. Everyone needs a saw of some sort. A person should master these common tools because they are useful in solving many problems.

In competitive intelligence, it is also true that there are common tools that should be identified and acquired early. Although you don’t have to have all of these tools on day one, it is useful to know that you will need them. Here is a partial list by category of some tools that you will likely need.

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