Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, or “Just wanting it doesn’t get you there”

Quit the foreplay and answer the “how” question

Leadership-management summary takeaway: Aspirations, goals and values are not a strategy. Strategy answers the ‘how’ question. In Richard Rumelt’s terms, in light of your longer-term aspirations, what is the crux challenge you face now? How will you focus your resources to meet and overcome it? That creates strategy. Everything else is avoidance.

I continue rounding out this new-stack anchoring with a book review; not that the books (Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, and The Crux, 2022) need any more commendations, but because talking about them is the clearest and fastest way to explain my orientation to anticipatory leadership and therefore the broad tenor of posts to come.

Any time one is talking about leadership or foresight or goals or innovation or planning or organization renewal, one is talking strategy. Strategy is a design of policy and action to achieve a desired result, not what the result is.

Strategy is not the intention to stand on top of K2, it is how you will get to stand there. Not a picture of the end of the game, but a theory of how to win it. (For more on strategy as a theory see this:

Asking “how” tunes out non-strategy, that is: nice-sounding general statements of purpose, vision, values, aspirations and positive thinking. It foregrounds obstacles to be overcome and presses thinking to how to do this.

Says Rumelt: “Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, ‘vision’, planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of those things. (GSBS p.2)

Goals are the outcome of a successful strategy. Strategy identifies the key challenge(s) and obstacles between you and the goal (why is this difficult? What is holding us back?) and addresses them.

Rumelt says bad strategy is “held aloft by the hot hope that one can avoid dealing with these tricky fundamentals and the difficulties of mastering them… bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy.” (GSBS p.58)

More on this in posts to come. But here, what we have is management focus on the easy stuff (aspiration) as a displacement busywork activity because actually finding ways past obstacles is hard. (Rumelt is specific here that hurdle avoidance is a function of both internal organizational-political issues, and difficulties prioritizing and understanding external world dynamics.)

Across the two books, which are rich with reporting of actual interaction with real-world management dilemmas, Rumelt comes to a three-part summary of good strategy: first (with longer-term intention or ‘vision’ in mind) assess which obstacles and challenges are crux-important now and which are not or can be postponed; second, craft solutions that properly respond to the difficulties of dealing with crux-challenges; third, don’t dilute focus on these two.

How to craft solutions? Sadly, but realistically, there is no a-b-c checkbox for this. What Rumelt says is, if you get people and adequate resources together and face them fully and honestly towards the foremost important obstacles between them and the goal, solutions will start to emerge. A path over, through or around the challenge will appear: that is strategy will be formed. Perhaps the path will be flawed. But earnestly re-committing with full motivation and intention to achieving the goal is no path at all.