While STRATEGY is about:

• Building & strengthening competitive advantages
• Offering your products/services to a niche set of customers in a unique way & understanding customer’s changing needs
• Understanding the competition business models & what clearly differentiates you from them
• Creating substantial value for customers & capturing the value through appropriate profit models
• Building strategic controls
• Creating stickiness with the customers

OPERATIONS on the other hand is more about:

• Efficiency, productivity, capacity utilization, cost optimization & process improvements
• Efficient supply chain management
• Kaizen, 5S, TQM, TPM, TEI
• Reducing throughput times
• Speed-to-market, etc.

Even if you are the best-in-the-world at operations, it is not going to be enough to guarantee continued business success. Business leaders must therefore learn to differentiate between strategy-building-execution and operations. Without this clear differentiation, success is just a matter of luck.