Liz on the Biz, aka the brilliant Liz Zielinski, CMM, asks an interesting question: In the Battle of Tactics vs. Strategy, Which Wins? She then goes on to explain the roles of mission, strategy, and tactics in a very clear, clean, and concise way:
"The strategy is a deliberately constructed plan that will be employed in order to pursue the mission, and the tactics are the smaller actions taken to execute the strategy. If an organization's ideology is compared to a pyramid, then the tactics are the supporting base, the strategy is the balanced design and the mission is the culminating tip."
So it's not possible for it to be a battle between strategy and tactics, is it? It's not an either/or—for a meeting to succeed to moving an organization closer to achieving its mission, you need both strategy and tactics. Just as for a meeting to accomplish its mission, you need to have goals and the means to accomplish them, along with tactics such as meeting space that will work with you, not against you, and ways to keep participants moving easily from activity to activity.
I've always thought the strategy versus tactics frame of mind to be a counterproductive one, when it's so obvious that you need to have both if you want to create an effective experience.
I'm no math genius, but even I can do these equations:
Strategy-tactics=mind-fluff/frustration
Tactics-strategy=an exercise in futility/tail-chasing
Tactics+strategy=mission accomplished
I'd add that this holds true for pretty much everything, not just meetings.