Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

One of the most important resources a business can have is valuable privileged information—that is, knowing something that others do not.

use your relative advantages to impose out-of-proportion costs on the opposition and complicate his problem of competing with you.

uses high-sounding words and phrases to hide these failings.

Good strategy rests on a hard-won base of such knowledge, and any new strategy presents the opportunity to generate it. A new strategy is, in the language of science, a hypothesis, and its implementation is an experiment. As results appear, good leaders learn more about what does and doesn’t work and adjust their strategies accordingly.

As we learn from Marco Tinelli, turning around a chain-link system requires direct leadership and design. Conversely, the excellence achieved by a well-managed chain-link system is difficult to replicate.

Not because of secrecy, but because good strategy itself is unexpected.

Bad strategic objectives.