Good Strategy Bad Strategy

Today, everyone has a strategy. The company has one, the sales team has one, the city council candidate has one, and the influencer claims to have one too. The problem, according to Richard Rumelt, is that the word has become an ornament: it is used to give an air of seriousness to any wish list, and almost no one stops to ask whether it is actually a strategy.

In Good Strategy Bad Strategy, the author proposes two tasks. The first is to learn to recognize bad strategy, which is much more common than most people think. The second is to understand what makes a good strategy, which is rare precisely because it requires making a choice, and choosing is uncomfortable.

The core argument is that strategy is not ambition, nor a slogan, nor a spreadsheet of goals. It is the response to a hard problem: a coherent plan to overcome an important obstacle. Without a clear obstacle, there is nothing to solve, and without a solution, there is no strategy.

Think of a year-end campaign in which the CEO announces the year of excellence and hangs posters down every hallway. Three months later, no one remembers what changed. The poster was the strategy, and that says it all.

The first symptom the author describes is what we can call fluff. These are texts full of big, abstract, pretty words that sound deep and say very little. Mission, vision, excellence, synergy, ownership, transformation. Jargon creates the impression that there is real thought where there is only vocabulary.

Imagine a retail chain that announces its strategy in a single sentence: to be the benchmark in innovative customer-focused solutions. Ask yourself: what problem does this solve? What will the company do differently on Monday morning? If no answer comes up, we are looking at decoration.

Rumelt suggests a simple test. If a strategic text could be copied by any competitor without changing a single line, it does not choose anything. And whoever chooses nothing, in practice, chooses to stay on autopilot.

The second symptom is refusing to look the problem in the eye. Many organizations write plans without saying what is actually hard. They talk about growing, gaining market share, and being the best, yet they do not explain why they are not there already. Without that diagnosis, any action seems reasonable and none seems necessary.

It is like the owner of an auto repair shop who sees revenue drop and decides to spend more on advertising, without checking whether the problem is pricing, customer service, turnaround time, or a new competitor down the street. Spending on ads without understanding what drives customers away is treating the symptom, not the cause.

The author notes that avoiding the challenge is comfortable, because naming what is hard means admitting failures and spoiling the mood. Yet that is precisely where strategy begins: it only exists where someone had the courage to state what the problem is.