// strategy library · richard rumelt
Bad strategy: Rumelt's four hallmarks.
Richard Rumelt's field guide to strategy that isn't, the hallmarks, from Good Strategy/Bad Strategy:
- Fluff. Gibberish masquerading as concepts: inflated language restating the obvious with a raised eyebrow of profundity.
- Failure to face the challenge. If the strategy never names the obstacle, it cannot address it. No diagnosis, no strategy, see The Kernel.
- Mistaking goals for strategy. Ambition, targets and dashboards are outputs of strategy work, not the work. A revenue target with no theory of how is a wish.
- Bad strategic objectives. Long lists of things to do ("dog's dinner objectives") or impracticable "blue sky" objectives with no bridge to action.
The overlap with Martin's Strategy Impostors is almost total, two vocabularies for the same disease, diagnosable with The Opposite Test.
Seam with the OKR system: mistaking goals for strategy is the exact failure mode of OKRs adopted without strategic choices behind them, and "dog's dinner objectives" are the strategy-level version of Task-Based Key Results.
Our synthesis of published thinking, Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (2011) and The Crux (2022), sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
// connected concepts
// put it to work
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