Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

these. 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.

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. One form of bad strategic objectives occurs when there is a scrambled mess of things to accomplish—a “dog’s dinner” of strategic objectives.

A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge.

Executives who complain about “execution” problems have usually confused strategy with goal setting. When the “strategy” process is basically a game of setting performance goals—so much market share and so much profit, so many students graduating high school, so many visitors to the museum—then there remains a yawning gap between these ambitions an

A leader’s most important responsibility is identifying the biggest challenges to forward progress and devising a coherent approach to overcoming them.

When a product gives a buyer an advantage in competition with others, there will be an especially rapid uptake of the product.

Business schools teach strategy but rarely apply the concept to themselves.

A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge.

combinations of resources for dealing with new risks and opportunities.