Bad strategy: Rumelt's four hallmarks.

From Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (2011), the four hallmarks. Fluff: gibberish masquerading as insight, inflated language restating the obvious ("customer-centric intermediation"). Failure to face the challenge: no diagnosis, and if you cannot name the obstacle you cannot have a strategy for overcoming it, only a mood. Mistaking goals for strategy: ambition, targets and dashboards presented as if they were a plan, when willpower is not an approach. Bad strategic objectives: either the "dog's dinner", a long list of things to do, or "blue sky", a restatement of the desired end state with the hard part, how, left out.

The hallmark that concerns us most

Hallmark three is the dangerous one for OKR shops, and Rumelt could have been writing about them. A wall of OKRs, even well-written, outcome-based, properly from-X-to-Y OKRs, is not a strategy. It is a goals list awaiting a diagnosis and a guiding policy, and dressing it in better formatting makes the absence harder to see, not smaller. This is why our methodology insists the strategy work precedes the goal work: OKRs are the quarterly bets that test a theory of advantage, and without the theory there is nothing to test.

The other hallmarks in goal form

Hallmark four's dog's dinner is exactly the portfolio that the wildly important focus principle exists to prevent: twelve "priorities", every function represented, nothing chosen. Its retail form, at the level of a single goal, is the task-based Key Result, a to-do item promoted to strategy by capitalisation. And fluff shows up in Objectives as inspiration-shaped language that fails the Opposite Test: if no rival would pursue the reverse, the sentence is decoration.

How this connects

Rumelt's catalogue has a close kin in Martin's Strategy Impostors: two lists of the same disease, compiled from different decades of consulting scar tissue. The antidote to all four hallmarks is the kernel, diagnosis first, and the fastest test to run on any strategic sentence remains the Opposite Test. We keep both catalogues in the library because they catch different lies: Martin catches the strategy that is really a plan, Rumelt catches the strategy that is really a wish.