Rumelt on strategy: An interesting new book on how to think about making plans

I don't think business has much to teach us about military
affairs at the tactical level. A major reason for that is a fundamental
difference: In business, you want to cut corners and aim for efficiencies,
because if you fail, you can just declare bankruptcy and start over. But I
think that the military can learn a lot about strategy from the world of
commerce, especially because businesspeople get feedback on their strategy
every day, while military commanders generally can only learn about that if
they go to war.

But I don't mean that military people should run out and buy
the latest bizness buzzword book. Instead, I think they should study people
like Alfred Sloan and Warren Buffett. And I also think they can learn from
people who study business strategy. That's by way of saying I have been reading
and enjoying Richard
Rumelt's Good
Strategy/Bad Strategy.

He is very quotable, so I thought I might as well get out of
the way and let him speak. Here are four things I underlined:

Good strategy almost always looks ... simple and does not
take a thick deck of PowerPoint slides to explain.

The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering
the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and
focusing actions to deal with those factors.

Like a quarterback whose only advice to teammates is 'Let's
win,' bad strategy covers up its failure to guide by embracing the language of
broad goals, ambition, vision, and values.

A strategy that fails to define a variety of plausible and
feasible immediate actions is missing a critical component.

Tom again: And that's just from his introduction. More
later.