This week I listened to some very smart colleagues talking about LinkedIn profiles, and AI, and how to use various prompts to help clients position themselves.
I learned a lot, and I’ll probably use some of the advice and tools. But mostly I came away perplexed.
The assumptions my colleagues are making about the world, and about what matters, and about how a person creates a professional reputation, struck me as very different from my own. I feel like I learned some very detailed, intricate, advanced level rules for a game that I don’t want my clients to play.
In college I first learned the distinction between strategy (knowing where you want to go, and why) and tactics (the tools and methods to get there, and the discernment of which tool to use in which circumstance).
The webinar challenged me because I could recognize the sophistication of the tactics while also fundamentally disagreeing with the strategy.
I keep returning to the distinction between strategy and tactics, and my role as a teacher and coach. Sometimes people ask for tactics, but they need strategy. Sometimes people don’t know the difference. (And in my role as a new business owner, trying to launch an online business, I recognize my own inability to think clearly about these distinctions in a new context.)
When you’re a beginner, it’s hard to discern whether experts are giving you strategy or tactics. My advice is try to understand and agree with the larger strategy, then delegate or consult with experts on the tactics and implementation.
