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

by Richard P. Rumelt

There was everything but strategy.

Simply being ambitious is not a strategy.

Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy.

A strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge.

A strategy is like a lever that magnifies force.

Then, in recognition that it is a dog’s dinner, the label “long-term” is added so that none of them need be done today.

By contrast, a blue-sky objective is usually a simple restatement of the desired state of affairs or of the challenge. It skips over the annoying fact that no one has a clue as to how to get there.

When a leader characterizes the challenge as underperformance, it sets the stage for bad strategy. Underperformance is a result. The true challenges are the reasons for the underperformance.

Bad strategy generates a feeling of dull annoyance when you have to listen to it or read it.

Condorcet’s paradox.

but at the end of the day no one wants to change what they are doing very much.

Scan through these documents and you will find pious statements of the obvious presented as if they were decisive insights.

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.

But I do know that believing that rays come out of your head and change the physical world, and that by thinking only of success you can become a success, are forms of psychosis and cannot be recommended as approaches to management or strategy.

An economist would tell her that she should take actions that maximize profit, a technically correct but useless piece of advice.