Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

by Richard P. Rumelt

Despite this, most organizations will not create focused strategies. Instead, they will generate laundry lists of desirable outcomes and, at the same time, ignore the need for genuine competence in coordinating and focusing their resources.

Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments.

Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles.

Bad strategy is long on goals and short on policy or action.

assumes that goals are all you need. It puts forward strategic objectives that are incoherent and, sometimes, totally impracticable. It uses high-sounding words and phrases to hide these failings.

Effective senior leaders don’t chase arbitrary goals. Rather, they decide which general goals should be pursued. And they design the subgoals that various pieces of the organization work toward. Indeed, the cutting edge of any strategy is the set of strategic objectives (subgoals) it lays out. One of the challenges of being a leader is mastering this shift from having others define your goals to being the architect of the organization’s purposes and objectives.