Recently I shared an article I wrote called 90 Percent of Managers Are Unproductive. It summarizes research showing that the overwhelming majority of managers stay busy but don’t work on anything of real substance.

So how do you work on substantive issues?

Two years ago, a video came out that radically reshaped my idea about what effective leaders and executives do. It’s from Harvard Business Review, and in it Roger Martin (former dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto and author of several business books) explains the difference between a plan and a strategy.

A few key points:

• A plan is a list of tasks that leads to accomplishing a goal or an objective
• A strategy is, as Martin puts it, “an integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choices in a way that you win”
• A strategy requires a theory—you need to believe, without knowing for sure, that if you follow the strategy, you will get an outcome that you want

Plans are gratifying because you lay them out and do them. It’s very rewarding to have a execute a plan.

Strategies are scary because they are full of uncertainty. You aren’t sure that you’ll get the outcome you want if you follow the strategy. They involve risk.

Strategizing is hard, and it’s what executives and upper management should spend their time doing. Then they should communicate that strategy down the chain of command so everyone in the organization knows what they’re hoping to achieve.

Image from Harvard Business Review/YouTube.