Understanding Strategy: The Key to Achieving Goals in Business and Tourism

Every successful business, whether a multinational hotel chain or a regional tourism board, runs on something more powerful than capital, talent, or even location. It runs on strategy. The word gets thrown around in boardrooms, classrooms, and casual conversation, often loosely. Yet at its core, strategy is the disciplined art of choosing how to win. For students of tourism planning and development, understanding what strategy truly means, where it comes from, and how it differs from tactics is the first step toward designing destinations and enterprises that thrive in a fiercely competitive global marketplace.

What strategy really means 🔗

Strategy, in the simplest terms, is a plan or approach designed to achieve a specific goal. But this definition barely scratches the surface. The word originates from the Greek strategos, meaning a general or military commander, and was historically used to describe the art of marshalling armies and outwitting opponents on the battlefield. Modern usage extends this idea into business, marketing, governance, and tourism, where the “battlefield” becomes the marketplace and the “opponents” become competing firms or destinations.

In a contemporary business context, strategy is about creating and sustaining an advantage over rivals. According to strategic management practitioners, strategy represents the long-term vision of an organisation, the high-level direction that shapes everything from product decisions to hiring choices. It answers the fundamental questions of what a business intends to achieve and why it matters, while leaving the how to be worked out through specific actions on the ground.

The shift from military origins to business thinking 🔗

While the term retains its martial flavour, strategy in business has moved far beyond simply defeating competitors. It now encompasses long-term positioning, organisational culture, customer value, sustainability, and adaptability. A modern tourism strategy, for example, is not just about beating the neighbouring state in tourist arrivals. It involves crafting a destination identity, protecting cultural and natural heritage, building infrastructure, and ensuring local communities benefit from tourism growth.

Rumelt’s view: strategy as sustained advantage 🔗

Few thinkers have shaped modern strategic thought as profoundly as Richard Rumelt, the former UCLA Anderson School professor whose books Good Strategy Bad Strategy and The Crux are considered essential reading. Rumelt argues that strategy is not the same as ambition, vision, or motivational language. It is, rather, a coherent response to a defined challenge.

According to Rumelt, the heart of strategic work involves identifying the critical factors in a situation and designing a coordinated way to deal with them. He sees strategy as the means by which an organisation creates and sustains an asymmetric advantage, an edge that competitors find difficult to imitate or erase. In his framework, often called the “kernel” of good strategy, three elements must work together:

The first is a clear diagnosis of the challenge facing the organisation. The second is a guiding policy that outlines the overall approach to addressing that challenge. The third is a set of coherent actions that translate the policy into practical, focused steps. A good diagnosis simplifies the overwhelming complexity of reality by pinpointing the few aspects that genuinely matter.

For tourism planners, this is a powerful lens. Consider a hill station losing visitors to newer destinations. A weak strategy might call for “more marketing” or “better facilities.” A Rumelt-style strategy would first diagnose the actual problem, perhaps congestion, outdated experiences, or weak digital presence, then design a guiding policy and coordinated actions to address that specific weakness.

Why most strategies fail Rumelt’s test 🔗

Rumelt is famously critical of what he calls “bad strategy,” which he says is increasingly common. He argues that traditional thinking studied products, markets, and customers while ignoring the realities of organisational functioning, leaving execution divorced from strategic choices. Many tourism boards fall into this trap by producing glossy vision documents filled with aspirations rather than honest assessments of competitive realities.

Mintzberg’s perspective: strategy as a pattern of decisions 🔗

Henry Mintzberg, the Canadian management scholar, offers a more fluid and observational view of strategy. While Rumelt focuses on what strategy should be, Mintzberg studied what strategy actually is in real organisations. His landmark 1987 paper introduced the famous 5 Ps of Strategy: Plan, Ploy, Pattern, Position, and Perspective.

Mintzberg’s most distinctive contribution is the idea that strategy is a pattern, specifically a pattern in a stream of actions. In other words, strategy is not only what an organisation intends to do but what it consistently ends up doing, whether or not those actions were planned. This insight separates deliberate strategies, where prior intentions are realised, from emergent strategies, where patterns develop without explicit intention.

The five lenses Mintzberg uses 🔗

As a plan, strategy is a consciously intended course of action, prepared in advance. As a ploy, it is a specific manoeuvre designed to outsmart a competitor, perhaps a sudden price drop or an unexpected new offering. As a pattern, strategy is the consistency that emerges from a series of decisions over time. As a position, strategy is the act of locating the organisation within its environment, a mediating force between internal capabilities and external markets. As a perspective, strategy is the ingrained worldview shared by members of the organisation, what Mintzberg poetically called the “collective mind.”

For a tourism enterprise, all five lenses matter. A heritage hotel might plan a renovation, deploy a ploy by undercutting a rival’s wedding packages, develop a pattern of personalised guest service over years, occupy a position as the only restored palace in the region, and operate from a perspective that prioritises authenticity over modernisation. Mindtools notes that the 5 Ps are best treated as different viewpoints to consider while developing a robust and successful strategy, rather than as a linear process.

Strategy in the tourism context 🔗

Tourism is one of the most strategy-sensitive industries in the world. Destinations are not simply geographical locations; they are complex products that compete for attention, investment, and visitor spending on a global stage. Destination Marketing Organisations must plan and develop tourism policies based on strategies and operating actions that create an advantage over rival destinations.

Take Kerala’s “God’s Own Country” branding, Rajasthan’s royal heritage positioning, or Goa’s beach-and-leisure identity. Each represents a deliberate strategic choice about how the destination wants to be perceived, who it wants to attract, and what experiences it will prioritise. These are not random marketing slogans. They are the visible tip of years of strategic planning involving infrastructure investment, stakeholder coordination, regulatory frameworks, and product development.

Comparative advantage versus competitive advantage 🔗

An important distinction in tourism strategy is the difference between comparative advantage, the natural endowments a destination possesses such as beaches, mountains, or monuments, and competitive advantage, the ability to actually convert those endowments into superior visitor value. A country may have stunning natural resources but still underperform if its strategic management of infrastructure, governance, and visitor experience is weak. Frameworks like the Travel and Tourism Development Index published by the World Economic Forum benchmark these dimensions globally, helping destination planners identify where their strategic gaps lie.

Strategy versus tactics: the hierarchy that matters 🔗

Closely tied to strategy is the concept of tactics, and the two are often confused. The simplest way to understand the distinction is this: strategy is the overarching plan that defines long-term direction, while tactics are the specific, short-term actions taken to execute that plan. Strategy answers what and why; tactics answer how and when.

The relationship is hierarchical. Tactics are formulated by middle-level management, whereas top-level management formulates strategy. A strategy may span three to five years; tactics may change every quarter or even every week, depending on market conditions. There can be many tactics within a single strategy, and tactics are subordinate to and in support of the broader strategic intent.

A tourism example to make it concrete 🔗

Suppose a state tourism board adopts the strategy of positioning the state as India’s premier wellness tourism destination. That is the strategic choice: the destination, the long-term direction, the competitive position. The tactics that flow from it might include launching an Ayurveda certification scheme for spas, partnering with international yoga influencers, organising wellness expos in source markets, redesigning the official tourism portal, and offering tax incentives to wellness resorts. Each tactic is concrete, time-bound, and measurable. Together, they execute the strategy.

Without strategy, tactics become busywork. Tactics without a strategy quickly turn into aimless activity, leading to wasted resources, team frustration, and incoherent positioning in the market. Conversely, a strategy without tactical execution is just a vision statement gathering dust.

Why strategy matters for tourism professionals 🔗

For students and practitioners in tourism planning and development, the practical takeaway is this: strategy is not a buzzword or a once-a-year exercise. It is the disciplined process of choosing where to compete, how to win, and what trade-offs to accept. Whether you are planning a homestay venture in Sikkim, a cultural festival in Kolkata, or a national tourism policy, the same strategic logic applies. Diagnose the real challenge. Choose a guiding approach grounded in genuine advantage. Design coherent actions. And monitor whether the pattern of your decisions matches your stated intent.

Both Rumelt’s clarity about challenge-based strategy and Mintzberg’s flexibility about emergent patterns offer complementary tools. Rumelt teaches discipline and focus; Mintzberg teaches adaptability and observation. Together, they prepare tomorrow’s tourism planners to operate in an industry where customer expectations, technology, and global competition are all in constant motion.

What do you think? If you were tasked with designing a tourism strategy for a lesser-known Indian destination, would you lean more on Rumelt’s challenge-driven approach or Mintzberg’s pattern-based view? And how would you ensure your tactics actually serve the strategy, rather than drifting into disconnected activity?

References

1. https://www.clearpointstrategy.com/blog/strategy-vs-tactics
2. https://medium.com/@DanlWebster/what-is-strategy-c20892c54313
3. https://aktiasolutions.com/what-is-strategy-business-strategy-product-strategy/
4. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/why-bad-strategy-is-a-social-contagion
5. https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/research/dstools/mintzbergs-5-ps-for-strategy/
6. https://www.mindtools.com/a1snnzo/mintzbergs-5-ps-of-strategy/
7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211973623000557
8. https://www.weforum.org/publications/series/travel-tourism-development-index/
9. https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-tactics-and-strategy.html
10. https://asana.com/resources/strategy-vs-tactics