Bad Strategy

Richard Rumelt is the Harry and Elsa Kunin Professor of Business and Society at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.  He has a forthcoming book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, who also writes at his blog http://www.strategyland.com/.

The McKinsey Quarterly has a review of the book (The perils of bad strategy) - - the world is full of bad strategy, and those who can spot it stand a much better chance of creating good strategies.  Key points from the book and article are as follows:

• A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision; it honestly acknowledges the challenges we face and provides an approach to overcoming them.
• Bad strategy ignores the power of choice and focus, trying to instead accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests.
• Bad strategy covers up its failure to guide by embracing the language of broad goals, ambition, vision, and values.
• A strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge.  If the challenge is not defined, it is difficult or impossible to assess the quality of the strategy.
• If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don't have strategy.  Instead, you have a stretch goal or a budget or a list of things you wish would happen.
• The job of the leader - - the strategist - - is also to create the conditions that will make the push effective, to have a strategy worthy of the effort called upon.
• Sign of bad strategy = fuzzy strategic objectives.
• A long list of things to do, often mislabeled as strategies or objectives, is not a strategy.  It is just a list of things to do.
• The "Blue Sky" strategy problem - - typically a simple restatement of the desired state of affairs or of the challenge.  It skips over the annoying fact that no one has a clue as to how to get there.
• Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.
• Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice.  And choice means setting aside some goals in favor of others.
• The Template-Style Strategy (The Vision, The Mission, The Values, The Strategies) are typically full of pious statements of the obvious presented as if they were decisive insights.  Strategy surrounded by empty rhetoric  and bad examples.
• The crafting of good strategy - - (1) a diagnosis - what is the nature of the challenge?  Reduce the complexity of the situation down to the critical core, (2) a guiding policy - - an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis, (3) coherent actions - - steps that are coordinated with one another to support the accomplishment of the guiding policy.
• Despite the roar of voices equating strategy with ambition, leadership, vision, or planning, strategy is none of these.  Rather, it is coherent action backed by an argument.  And the core of the strategist's work is always the same: discover the crucial factors in a situation and design a way  to coordinate and focus actions to deal with them.

And Lord Nelson?  Rumelt sees Nelson as a good example as strategist - - he saw the challenges of Trafalgar in 1805 and provided  an approach to overcoming them.