Good Strategy Bad Strategy

A diagnosis, a guiding policy, coherent action. Most documents called strategy contain none of the three.

Rumelt’s kernel is unglamorous and hard to argue with. A strategy is a diagnosis of what is actually in the way, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and a set of actions that cohere with each other. Bad strategy is a restatement of ambition with numbers attached.

The idea I took

The diagnosis comes first and is usually the missing part. When a platform roadmap is contested, the disagreement is almost never about the actions. It is about which constraint each person believes is binding. Writing the diagnosis down separately, and asking people to disagree with that instead, has saved more time than any prioritisation method I have used.

Where it stops

Rumelt is better at diagnosing bad strategy than at helping you produce good strategy on a deadline, with the information you actually have.