Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters

by Richard P. Rumelt

To see this displacement, consider Peter Senge’s enormously successful book The Fifth Discipline, published in 1990. One of Senge’s most influential ideas was the vital importance of “shared vision”: “It is impossible to imagine the accomplishments of building AT&T, Ford, or Apple in the absence of shared vision.… What is most important is that these individual’s visions became genuinely shared among people throughout all levels of their companies—focusing the energies of thousands and creating a common identity among enormously diverse people.”12 This statement is very appealing to many people and, at the same time, is quite obviously untrue. Ascribing the success of Ford and Apple to a vision, shared at all levels, rather than pockets of outstanding competence mixed with luck, is a radical distortion of history. Apple did not invent the personal computer—the technology was in the air and hundreds of entrepreneurs sought to design and build “computers for everyman.” Apple’s success derived, in large measure, from Steve Wozniak’s ability to cleverly trick the Motorola microprocessor at the center of the Apple II into directly driving the video and a floppy disk—using straight outputs from the CPU—rather than building expensive controllers. And, from the advent of VisiCalc, which gave people other than hobbyists a reason to buy an Apple II.13 Similarly, Ford’s “cars for everyman” vision was hardly unique and not necessarily shared by the five-dollar-a-day assembly line work...