Good Strategy Bad Strategy

A framework for creating and auditing strategy, distilled from Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Good strategy has a simple underlying logic — an honest diagnosis of the critical challenge, a guiding policy for overcoming it, and coherent actions that carry the policy out. Use this skill to detect the four hallmarks of bad strategy and to replace goal lists and vision decks with a working kernel.

Core Principle

Strategy is coherent action backed by an honest diagnosis — not goals, vision, or wishful thinking. A goal ("20% growth") names an ambition; a strategy explains how the ambition will be achieved given the actual obstacles. Bad strategy is not the absence of strategy but an active substitute for it: buzzword fluff, refusal to name the challenge, and laundry lists of initiatives. The heart of strategy work is choice — concentrating effort and resources on the one or two pivotal objectives whose accomplishment unlocks everything else.

Scoring

Goal: 10/10. Rate strategies, plans, and strategy documents 0-10 against the principles below. Report the current score and the specific changes needed to reach 10/10.

• 9-10: Complete kernel — honest diagnosis, choiceful guiding policy, coordinated resource-backed actions — aimed at a pivot point, with an explicit list of what will not be done
• 7-8: Kernel present but one element weak: thin diagnosis, a policy that rules little out, or actions not yet coordinated and funded
• 5-6: The challenge is named, but the plan is a list of independent initiatives and some goals masquerade as strategy
• 3-4: Mostly goals, targets, and vision statements; no diagnosis; fluff in key passages; nothing ruled out
• 0-2: Pure bad strategy — buzzword fluff, dog's-dinner objective lists, denial of the real challenge

Framework