Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

by Richard P. Rumelt

There was no magical solution to his problem of wanting strong country-based marketing, Pan-European initiatives, and no noses out of joint, all at the same time. As long as strategy remained at the level of intent and concept, the conflicts among various values and between the organization and the initiative remained tolerable. It was the imperative of action that forced a decision about which issue was actually the most important. This executive’s problem was primarily organizational rather than rooted in product-market competition. Yet the kernel of strategy—a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action—applies to any complex setting. Here, as in so many situations, the required actions were not mysterious. The impediment was the hope that the pain of those actions could, somehow, be avoided. Indeed, we always hope that a brilliant insight or very clever design will allow us to accomplish several apparently conflicting objectives with a single stroke, and occasionally we are vouchsafed this kind of deliverance. Nevertheless, strategy is primarily about deciding what is truly important and focusing resources and action on that objective. It is a hard discipline because focusing on one thing slights another.