book review: good strategy, bad strategy by richard rumelt
19 Nov 2022
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard P. Rumelt
What are the main ideas?
- good strategy is unexpected. because it’s so rare.
- bad strategy is everywhere.
- a primary reason why bad strategy proliferates is because it requires making choices. and the world many of us live in creates people that are unwilling or actually unable to make good/wise choices.
- bad strategy often looks like laundry lists of objectives or dreamy goals with little to no coherence.
- any good strategy has three parts: the analysis, the guiding policy, a set of coherent actions to carry out the guiding policy. these three pieces rumelt calls “the kernel.”
- some sources of power in strategy are: leverage, well-set proximate objectives, chain-linking in systems, using design, specific focus, growth, competitive advantage, wielding dynamics of systems, and navigating inertia and entropy.
- strategy isn’t like deduction (which works only when you have enough/all the information/data about a situation). strategy is more like a hypothesis; it’s based on some past knowledge or wisdom but it is a conjecture that needs to be tested and verified to be useful or not.
- a great way to develop your strategic thinking is to made judgments about what you think other people will think about a situation and then see if you were correct. this also works with your own thinking.
- humans are really good at getting to know people. we can use this to our advantage by creating “expert panels” in our minds and then checking our strategic thinking against how we think those experts would respond.
If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?
start noticing when people refer to their strategy. see if it’s just a list of objectives and/or goals. see if an actual strategy exists.
How would I describe the book to a friend? this book is a slog but much of the thinking in it is valuable if strategy is not your default cup of tea. unfortunately, the author is very judgmental of other people, including other strategists. i think maybe the culture(s) he moves in venerate that, but to me it just came off uncompassionate and rude/mean. if you can read through that, the content and thinking feels sound. i definitely feel like my strategy awareness leveled up here.
reminder: book review structure
words / writing / post-processing
384w / ??min / 2min