When a child is born, those around you tell you to observe, to look at the needs of the child and to act with patience. Every kid grows in his/her own rhythm - this is what you are told. Then, almost imperceptibly, the comparisons with others begin: mine ate at x months, made his first steps at x months, knew the planets at x years, the series of extracurricular activities start that become synonyms with the success in life etc. Things that don't necessarily answer the needs of the kids. Things that are in fact.... noise, not sound.

When you are made an offer, you have the tendency to say that you’ve hit the jackpot. Let’s suppose that you have an obsolete phone of maximum 1 year, with a certain operating system, with everything of the voice services - meaning everything you need. You are offered a new phone, with a different operating system (without being asked if this is what you want), but it is the latest model on the market, with everything you need, look minutes, both national and international, roaming and, look, another phone number - maybe you give it to a friend... Plus another smartphone. Things that you don’t need. Noise.

All the Customer Care and Sales trainings have included a module or at least a reference to the needs of the client. Back to business, under the pressure of the operational, of the “n” number of priorities just as important and urgent, of ambitious figures, under the sinuous track of mindset change and personal development, information remains behind, as a nicely told story.

In a Talent program, the subjects receive as well amazing training offers, with everything included. And the ones involved in the “internal kitchen” try to make everybody happy in their approaches and to keep up with the “requirements” of the market.

Any project, process, business without a clearly articulated strategy is the noise before failure. Strategy and tactics must go hand in hand. A quote from Sun Tzu (Art of War), adequate for this subject, mentions that strategy without tactics is the slowest way towards victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat.

What? How? What matters for the business, organization, team, clients? How to be different? How to connect the dots to have a coherence in everything you do?

I’ll get back to another quote from Sun Tzu: Everybody may see these tactics through which I conquer, but what nobody can see is the strategy from where the victory evolved.

Instead of conclusion: before deciding what business initiative to use, before sending a message, before approaching a client with an offer too good to refuse from your point of view, before adding development programs to increase motivation and engagement among people, before determining if Facebook is better for your business than LinkedIn, start from the point that will have in fact the biggest impact possible: strategy.