Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

by Richard P. Rumelt

The first logical problem in chain-link situations is to identify the bottlenecks, and Marco did that—quality, sales’ technical competence, and cost. The second, and greatest, problem is that incremental change may not pay off and may even make things worse. That is why systems get stuck. Marco’s solution to this problem was to take personal responsibility for the final result and direct others’ attention to the three bottlenecks, one after another. There were no immediate returns to the first campaign, but he did not stop nor did he operate a system that heaped blame on his department managers. Instead, he congratulated them for achieving the proximate goal of the first campaign and moved on to the second. There are little or no payoffs to incremental improvements in chain-link systems, but Marco avoided this problem by shutting down the normal system of local measurement and reward, refocusing on change itself as the objective.