Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters Hardcover – Deckle Edge, July 19, 2011

I thought I remembered my friend Art Petty saying that he liked Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt. So, I emailed him and asked if that was true. Here’s his reply.“Like is an understatement. Rumelt’s kernel of Strategy is the most powerful, supple approach for creating clarity and coherence on strategy I’ve yet encountered.”Art’s no novice. He’s been an effective executive and an effective consultant for decades. He works with clients on strategy. And, guess what? The book lived up to Art’s recommendation and then some.The kernel of Strategy that Art referred to is a great reason to read the book, even if that’s all you get out of it. Here’s Rumelt’s description of the kernel.“A good strategy has an essential logical structure that I call the kernel. The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action. The guiding policy specifies the approach to dealing with the obstacles called out in the diagnosis. It is like a signpost, marking the direction forward but not defining the details of the trip. Coherent actions are feasible coordinated policies, resource commitments, and actions designed to carry out the guiding policy”.The kernel isn’t a magic formula. It’s a guide to the most important hard work you will do to create a strategy. If you’re a consultant, it’s a quick way to help you figure out if your client has a strategy or not. As Rumelt points out in the book, a lot of things masquerade as strategy. Plans and slogans and goals can look like strategy until you analyze them with a tool like the kernel.What makes creating a great strategy hard is that it involves choices, and we don’t like choices. We also don’t like hard work, so we skip the hard parts and just do the parts that are fun.In my experience, an awful lot of companies spend a day or so developing their strategy. They substitute discussion for diagnosis. Talk replaces analysis. Then they trot out some fine-sounding generalities instead of taking time to craft guiding principles. Biz-speak often replaces clear language here. There’s a lot of talk about what to do, but precious little about how to coordinate activities.Most of those companies spend most of their time on what they’re going to do, after skipping the hard parts of diagnosis and guiding principles. Art says that, since reading Rumelt, he spends more time on the strategy process. He spends half of the time on diagnosis, another 40 percent on what Rumelt calls the guiding philosophy, and 10 percent on coherent actions. It’s much harder to do it that way than it is to go off to an offsite and whip up some generalities that sound good but don’t have much impact on day-to-day work life.Here’s what it comes down to. The kernel is the way you develop a good strategy. The kernel is also the way that you identify bad strategy, whether it’s yours or someone else’s. Now that I’ve read this book, I won’t think about doing strategy the same way ever again. Rumelt has helped me know some danger signals to watch for. And he’s given me a language for guiding the process of creating and evaluating a strategy.The kernel is reason enough to buy and read this book, but there are lots of other goodies here, too. There’s analysis of many business situations that I found both absorbing and compelling.There’s one other thing you can take away from this book. Even when you do the work to create and execute a good strategy, you can still not succeed. You can make bad choices, even with a good process. Luck still plays a role. Unforeseen events play a role. The competition plays a role.This book was written in 2006. Rumelt makes several predictions about how some things will play out in the years ahead. He gets some of them right, some of them wrong, and some of them a mix of both. That’s a good thing because it demonstrates what’s true in real life. There are times when you can do everything wrong and have things turn out right. And there are times when you can do everything right and still go down in flames.One of my favorite quotes about life is from the American writer and horseplayer, Damon Runyon. It goes like this: “The race may not always be to the swift, nor victory to the strong, but that’s the way you bet.” Developing a good strategy is the hard work of figuring out how to bet.In A NutshellGood Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt gives you a roadmap that will help you develop better strategy. Ironically, that will make your work harder. Thankfully, it will also increase your odds of success.

There are two things we often notice when helping a company craft their strategic story: 1) the strategic story process helps executives clarify what they really think the strategy should be; and 2) way too many executives can't actually tell you their company's strategy without reaching for a document. It's only since reading Richard Rumelt's new book, Good Strategy Bad Strategy, that I can see both observations are symptoms of not having a story to tell about the company's strategy.The second point came quickly to us because we know stories are memorable and therefore if your strategy was a story then you have a better chance of remembering it. Ipso facto (I'm not 100% sure of what this means but it felt right to put it here). The first point, however, goes to the heart of Rumelt's thesis: good strategy comprises a kernel made from a diagnosis of what's happening that's causing a challenge; a guiding policy on how the company will overcome this challenge; and a coherent set of actions that will translate the strategy into reality.Most strategies are defined as a set of aspirational goals, which Rumelt argues is a big mistake that has resulted from the template view of strategy creation: create a vision, state a purpose, set some goals, bingo, you now have a strategy. An effective strategy is all about action, about getting something done, it's concrete, plausible and doable. These attributes are much the same for stories.So from a story perspective, the kernel consists of the story of what's happening, the story of what will be done, and then the unfolding stories that emerge from the actions. These stories then help leaders decide how they will adapt to the inherent complexity of business.This is not just Shawn's story-coloured glasses making this connection. Rumelt says himself that, "The diagnosis for the situation should replace the overwhelming complexity of reality with a simpler story, a story that calls attention to its crucial aspects. This simplified model of reality allows one to make sense of the situation and engage in further problem solving." (p. 81)Rumelt's book is divided into three parts. Part 1, Good & Bad Strategy, describes the differences between what makes a good'ne and what makes a stinker. Part 2, Sources of Power, describes a series of approaches the strategist can adopt to improve their strategy. It includes topics such as focus, leverage, advantage and growth. This section finishes with a chapter on putting it all together that examines the graphics chip maker NVIDIA and their strategy, which incorporates many of Rumelt's sources of power. As suggested by Rumelt, I skipped to the NVIDIA chapter before reading each source of power in detail.The last part, Thinking Like a Strategist, has three chapters which explore what is mean to reflect on how you think about strategy.The book is very Gladwellesque in the way Rumelt tells stories. Each chapter is full of personal anecdotes, stories from history and Rumelt does a lovely job of telling stories that include analogies which he links to important strategy concepts. For example he tells the story of meeting a friend in Baja California who was a combat helicopter pilot. In some musing over a beer Richard (I bet he is know to his friends as Dick) says it would be better to be in a helicopter than a plane if the engines died because the rotors would keep turning and act like a parachute. He friend chuckled and said "only if the right actions are done within a second of losing power and, most importantly, without thinking about it." Rumelt uses this analogy to discuss how companies have intuitive capabilities gained from experience which allows them to do things other companies just can't. One type of competitive advantage. GS/BS is full of these interesting analogies.Just a note on book architecture. I love endnotes. I'm always following those suckers to find out the original references and other tidbits hidden behind those superscripted numbers. But here's the thing: if your end notes are arranged by chapter with a new set of endnote numbers then you need to have the chapter number/name on each page of your book otherwise I have to thumb back through the chapter to the chapter title page just to work out where the hell I am. This is not just a criticism of Rumelt's book, this is most business books out there. Publishers and book designers, please note. OK, rant over.This book is a bloody ripper. It has a really practical feel without getting dot pointy. The stories carry the book and keep it interesting and because many of the stories are personal anecdotes you develop a deep admiration for Rumelt's character and experience. Well worth getting yourself a copy.