Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

by Richard P. Rumelt

Her lunar specification wasn’t the truth—the truth was that we didn’t know. It was a strategically chosen proximate objective—one the engineers knew how to tackle, so it helped speed the project along. And it was sensible and clever at the same time. You could write a PhD thesis on the options analysis implicit in her insight that if the lunar surface wouldn’t support a straightforward lander, we had more than a design problem—the whole U.S. program of landing a man there would be in deep trouble. Writing the history of Surveyor, Oran W. Nicks said, “The engineering model of the lunar surface actually used for Surveyor design was developed after study of all the theories and information available. Fortunately, this model was prepared by engineers who were not emotionally involved in the generation of scientific theories, and the resulting landing system requirements were remarkably accurate.”4 This lunar surface specification absorbed much of the ambiguity in the situation, passing on to the designers a simpler problem. Not a problem easily solved, or to which a solution already existed, but a problem that was solvable. It would take time and effort, but we knew that we could build a machine to land on Phyllis’s moon.