Our columnist Klaus Brink Bäumer is program director of the MDR in Leipzig. This is where he writes about politics and language every week, currently in a small series about the art of success. You can reach him at Klaus.Brinkbaeumer@extern.tagesspiegel.de or on Twitter at @Brinkbaeumer.
Opportunism is tactical. What we need in times of overlapping crises are goals and strategies; Unfortunately, precisely these hectic, aggressive times produce the opposite – not more, but less strategic thinking, not less, but more tactical calculation: opportunism, little flag in the storm.
According to football coach Arsène Wenger, vertical societies have become horizontal ones, in which everyone is always yelling an opinion about everything. The most important skill that leaders need to have today is resilience – to maintain the freedom to think strategically.
Not every lesson we hear and read from sports heroes or even billionaires helps in real life.
“I run to where the puck is going to be, not where it was,” Wayne Gretzky once said, and might as well have said, “You: chumps, I: genius”. But some things help.
Ben Ainslie, one of the three or four best sailors in the world, once told me during a conversation in Cornwall that we first discuss our goal and our strategy fearlessly and argumentatively with the smartest advisors, with whom we would of course have surrounded ourselves beforehand, and then make a binding agreement and write them down, and finally repeat them constantly so that everyone in the team internalizes both. Since linguistic clarity is always and everywhere important, especially when it comes to distinguishing between strategy and tactics: “Strategy is my long-term plan. Tactics is reacting to the opponent, to gusts of wind, tactics is acting at the speed of thought within the strategic framework,” says Ainslie.
When we read through books about success, some wisdom sticks that often appears there:
– The greatest bosses were not necessarily visionaries. They analyzed what was not working elsewhere and what was working well elsewhere. They renounced the former and built on the latter.
– Something always happens that increases the incentive to inflate our strategy with new paragraphs. The Harvard economist Ronald Heifetz advises against this: We must remain clear about the goal and the path to the goal. And one more thing: He has never experienced too much communication, too many explanations – for at least one person in the company, every plan, no matter how often it is explained, is still new.
– The best bosses aren’t afraid to speak up and tackle their team’s biggest concerns head-on.
The Merkel myth that she thinks everything from the end was glorifying nonsense
As I said last week: it’s not all that easy, no one said it was. But those who prioritize tactics over strategy make mistakes like John McCain, who in 2008 named the loud but undertalented Sarah Palin as his running mate because the people wanted a row. McCain thereby sacrificed his goal (the presidency) and his strategy (quiet competence), and Barack Obama won easily.
This is also the reason why we should rate Angela Merkel differently today than during her celebrated final weeks in the Chancellery. That she thinks everything from the end was the Merkel myth, but it was glorifying nonsense.
Was the move away from nuclear energy and the supposed energy revolution more than just a zeitgeist after Fukushima? And the servile allegiance to Putin, the politically sanctioned and heightened dependence on Russian gas? What goal and what plan was there, despite all knowledge, beyond convenience and opportunism?
Source: Tagesspiegel
I am a technology author with 8 years of experience in journalism. My writing covers the latest technology advancements and trends, drawing on my expertise in news journalism and social media platforms. I have contributed to major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.
