Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters

Strategic actions that are not coherent are either in conflict with one another or taken in pursuit of unrelated challenges.

A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

Strategic planning was the responsibility of the dean and the faculty executive council. I met with this group and explained the concepts of pivotal issues and the proximate objective. Then I asked the group to imagine that they were allowed to have only one objective. And the objective had to be feasible. What one single feasible objective, when a

By committing to a judgment—especially a diagnosis—you increase the probability that you will disagree with some of the assessments of others, and thereby increase the chance of

“Let’s start with technical assistance,” I say. “Melissa pointed out that putting soda in a can is not atomic science. What kind of customer needs technical help to get their product into a can?” My question only evokes blank looks. I have lectured on how to tackle seemingly formless questions like this. The first trick is to replace general nouns

People normally think of strategy in terms of action—a strategy is what an organization does. But strategy also embodies an approach to overcoming some difficulty. Identifying the difficulties and obstacles will give you a much clearer picture of the pattern of existing and possible strategies. Even more important, you will gain access to how chang

Good guiding policies are not goals or visions or images of desirable end states. Rather, they define a method of grappling with the situation and ruling out a vast array of possible actions.

A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or

Many writers on strategy seem to suggest that the more dynamic the situation, the farther ahead a leader must look. This is illogical. The more dynamic the situation, the poorer your foresight will be. Therefore, the more uncertain and dynamic the situation, the more proximate a strategic objective must be. The proximate objective is guided by fore