Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Thus, once Schultz initiated business operations, he began to accumulate privileged information.

In general, people will not push further because the analysis of unstructured information is hard, time-consuming work that requires both a rich knowledge of facts and well-developed skills in logic, deduction, and induction.

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.

Having a coherent strategy—one that coordinates policies and actions. A good strategy doesn’t just draw on existing strength; it creates strength through the coherence of its design. Most organizations of any size don’t do this. Rather, they pursue multiple objectives that are unconnected with one another or, worse, that conflict with one another.

If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen.

This personal skill is more important than any one so-called strategy concept, tool, matrix, or analytical framework. It is the ability to think about your own thinking, to make judgments about your own judgments.

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 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.

Xerox’s powerful resource position—its knowledge and patents regarding plain-paper copying—was the accumulated result of years of clever, focused, coordinated, inventive activity.