Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
A leader’s most important responsibility is identifying the biggest challenges to forward progress and devising a coherent approach to overcoming them.
Richard Rumelt • Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.
Richard Rumelt • Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
in general, if you have a “me-too” product, you prefer fragmented retail buyers. On the other hand, if you have a better product, a powerful buyer such as Dell can help it see the light of day.
Richard Rumelt • Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
A strategic resource is a kind of property that is fairly long lasting that has been constructed, developed over time, designed, or discovered by a company and that competitors cannot duplicate without suffering a net economic loss.
Richard Rumelt • Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Implicit in these principles is the notion that tight integration comes at some cost. That is, one does not always seek the very highest level of integration in a design for a machine or a business. A more tightly integrated design is harder to create, narrower in focus, more fragile in use, and less flexible in responding to change.
Richard Rumelt • Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
If the organization has few resources, the challenge can be met only by clever, tight integration. On the other hand, if more resources are available, then less tight integration may be needed.7 Put differently, the greater the challenge, the greater the need for a good, coherent, design-type strategy.
Richard Rumelt • Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
A design-type strategy is an adroit configuration of resources and actions that yields an advantage in a challenging situation. Given a set bundle of resources, the greater the competitive challenge, the greater the need for the clever, tight integration of resources and actions. Given a set level of challenge, higher-quality resources lessen the n
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When someone says “Managers are decision makers,” they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer.
Richard Rumelt • Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
the primary way business firms compete is by placing their offers in front of buyers, each trying to offer a more attractive deal. This is a process more like a dance contest than a military battle.